Roll Calls

In recent weeks, state election officials—including in Arizona, Minnesota, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin—have received letters from the Department of Justice (DOJ) about their voter registration lists. Some letters demanded states turn over information about how they manage the lists. Others threatened legal action or federal funding withheld if the state refused to comply with the DOJ’s demands.

Here are the facts: Election officials across the country regularly remove ineligible voters from their lists, in accordance with state and federal law. They already have rigorous procedures. They cross-check their lists with change-of-address notices, death records, and more to keep their records up to date. These processes follow a strict set of guidelines to ensure that eligible voters aren’t accidentally kept off voter rolls.

The letters from the DOJ are part of the federal government’s effort to put President Trump’s election-focused executive order into effect. It’s worth repeating that the president’s order is based on conspiracy theories about widespread voter fraud that have been repeatedly debunked. There has never been any evidence to support his claims.

“The tactics we’re seeing out of DOJ right now are building on what we’ve seen from anti-democracy groups for years,” States United’s Dax Goldstein recently told The New York Times. “They’re rooted in the same lies about elections, and they’re all meant to create noise and fear and concerns about issues with our elections that just don’t exist. Our elections are safe and secure, and election officials are working to keep them that way.”

This Week in Democracy

• In a new class-action case, a federal judge in New Hampshire blocked President Trump’s executive order that seeks to deny citizenship to some U.S.-born children from going into effect. The ruling applies to any child born on or after Feb. 20, when Trump’s order would have taken effect.

  The case was brought after the U.S. Supreme Court limited federal judges’ power to issue nationwide orders—but left open the possibility that rulings in class-action cases could have nationwide effects.

  ➡️ READ: Sharing the Facts About Birthright Citizenship

• Trump signed the One Big Beautiful Bill Act into law. The bill contains hundreds of provisions affecting the federal budget and tax law. It includes an unprecedented reduction in federal funding for Medicaid, which provides health care for around one in five Americans. The cuts will shift costs to states and result in lost insurance coverage for Americans across the country, according to nonpartisan experts.

  ➡️ READ: Sharing the Facts About the State Impact of Medicaid Cuts

• The U.S. Supreme Court temporarily allowed the Trump administration to move forward with its plans for mass layoffs of federal employees while the cases against those plans move through the courts. The Supreme Court didn’t rule on the legality of the plans.

  ➡️ READ: Sharing the Facts About the State Impact of Federal Workforce Cuts

State of the States

In Georgia, an appeals court upheld a lower court’s ruling that local election board members must certify election results by the deadlines set in state law.

The lower court’s decision came last October after the State Election Board passed a vaguely worded rule that required counties to conduct a “reasonable inquiry” before certifying the results. But the election process already includes steps to address any questions or concerns. If county election boards had the power to refuse to certify, “Georgia voters would be silenced,” the judge wrote last year.

In Wisconsin, a bipartisan group of business leaders sued the Wisconsin Elections Commission, arguing that the state’s congressional maps are anti-competitive. They asked a judge to order the maps to be redrawn before the 2026 elections.

“All Wisconsin voters, no matter who we are or where we’re from, deserve an equal voice and an equal say in electing leaders whose decisions impact our lives,” said Jeff Mandell of Law Forward, one of the law firms representing the group. “Wisconsin’s current congressional plan is a textbook example of an anti-competitive gerrymander. Candidates regularly win races by a margin of 30% or more. Wisconsin’s congressional map is an outlier, and it has been suppressing voters’ voices for too long.”

The Wisconsin Supreme Court declined to hear two challenges to the maps last month. Gov. Tony Evers filed an amicus brief in one of the cases, urging the court to take the case and arguing that the current maps are unfair. Evers was co-represented by States United and the Wisconsin Department of Justice.