A quarter millennia after its founding, the United States faces a stark choice that will define its future.

In the years ahead, the country can continue to follow the path blazed by President Donald Trump, who is attempting to bring states under the authority of a more powerful federal government led by him. Or it can move in a different direction, one where states become a heavier counterweight to an aggressive White House and rebalance the relationship between the states and the federal government.

The United States’ foundations are undergoing a significant stress test, experts say, raising questions about whether a radical reconception of the nation lies ahead. The federalism that has helped bind the states — and therefore, the nation — together is fraying, pulled apart by a president who demonstrates little regard for many of the nation’s core principles.

“I wonder if we will come to a breaking point in which the institutions of government no longer serve the society in which we live,” said David Adkins, a former Kansas Republican state lawmaker who’s now the executive director and CEO of the Council of State Governments, a national group that represents all three branches of state government.

“And again,” he said, “we will be required to balance personal liberty and freedoms against what powers we want the government to exercise.”

While a long line of modern presidents have expanded the powers of their office, Trump has wielded the executive branch as a weapon to punish states and those state leaders he views as enemies. Federal dollars and resources have become a form of leverage he has tried to use to pursue his political aims and deliver the retribution he promised to, if reelected. He is trying to assert an unprecedented level of White House control over state-run elections.

How states — and the people — respond will forever shape the nation.

As the United States marks the 250th anniversary of the country’s founding, Stateline has been exploring how the Trump era is transforming the relationship between the states and the federal government. This article is the fourth in an occasional series examining the fraught moment and what evolving — and often deteriorating — state-federal ties mean for the country, now and in the future.

As the Trump administration has been aggressively pursuing its agenda on immigration, election restrictions and other issues, Democratic states have been developing playbooks of resistance that could endure even after Trump’s time in office. They have enacted laws aimed at regulating the behavior of federal agents and preventing any attempts to illegally subvert the November midterm elections, for instance.

At least eight states have adopted laws limiting masking by law enforcement, according to Prosecutors Alliance Action, a nonprofit advocacy group that supports the legislation. The mask restrictions are in response to the widespread use of masks by Immigration and Customs Enforcement, Border Patrol and other federal agents, as well as anger over the deployment of agents in places such as Minneapolis and Los Angeles.

Some states have also taken action to thwart any federal attempt to take over elections, which under the U.S. Constitution are run by the states. Administration officials have refused to rule out sending federal agents or troops to the polls, something already prohibited under federal law except in extremely narrow circumstances.

In late May, California Democratic Gov. Gavin Newsom signed into law a bill that prohibits election officials from providing federal agents with access to voter lists or technology absent a court order. And New Mexico lawmakers earlier this year passed a bill to prohibit troops at polling places.

More recently, officials in some states threatened legislation to undercut Trump’s Anti-Weaponization Fund by taxing payments at 100%. Critics argued that the fund would be used to pay off the president’s allies. The U.S. Department of Justice has said it is backing off plans for the fund amid bipartisan opposition in Congress, but leaders have refused to confirm that in writing and a federal judge has said a lawsuit against the fund can proceed.

Collectively, these efforts offer a window into how states are testing ways to push back against the White House. While the Trump administration is challenging some of these measures in court, Democratic state lawmakers have demonstrated that state-level resistance to increasingly aggressive exercises of federal power is possible.

“It is incumbent upon state legislators and state governments to protect their people from this incredible overreach and this display of horrors and egregious behaviors we are seeing from the federal government,” said Pennsylvania state Sen. Amanda Cappelletti, a Democrat who has been pushing restrictions on ICE.

In response to Stateline’s questions for this series, White House spokesperson Davis Ingle said in a statement: “The Trump Administration faithfully upholds our Constitution and the immortalized American principles of federalism, the rule of law, and the separation of powers.”

Rethinking the Constitution

Conservatives have long complained that the federal government has grown too large and too powerful. As Democrats fight Trump, some Republicans see an opportunity to forge a new bipartisan consensus in favor of states’ authority.

Pennsylvania state Sen. Cris Dush, a Republican, said the federal government has been overreaching since at least Woodrow Wilson’s presidency in the early 20th century. He argues that too many powers have been ceded to the executive branch that belong to legislators.

“And that’s why we have a republic, not a democracy and not a king. It’s not supposed to go with the whims of either the public or whoever the chief executive is, and that’s why you’re now starting to see Democrats get on board with this,” Dush said.

“I’m glad to welcome anybody to this party that wants to come, because it’s all about getting the legislative authority back.”

Dush supports a convention of the states to draft proposed changes to the Constitution that limit federal power. The idea of calling a convention has long percolated in statehouses, especially among Republicans, but support for the idea appears to have grown in recent years.

Article V of the Constitution requires Congress to call a constitutional convention if two-thirds of state legislatures demand one but sets out few details about how such a gathering would operate. Any amendments proposed by a convention would need to be approved by three-fourths of the states.

Several different campaigns are pushing states to demand a convention, including one focused on a balanced budget amendment and another that seeks term limits. Collectively, 28 state legislatures have called for a convention, according to the good government group Common Cause, which opposes a convention. Thirty-six states must call for a convention to trigger one.

Former Utah Republican Gov. Gary Herbert has pushed for a balanced budget amendment to rein in federal spending and the ballooning national debt for more than 15 years. He said that states must lead the effort because Congress lacks the courage to confront the issue.

“The burgeoning debt is just the result of not having appropriate balance between the state and federal government,” he said.

While conservatives and liberals fear a so-called runaway convention that could radically reshape the face of American government, Herbert said those same fears were present 250 years ago as the Founding Fathers met in Philadelphia to reshape the Articles of Confederation into the current Constitution.

“Well, the result was pretty good,” he said. “You know, we got this great Constitution everybody says was really a divinely inspired kind of a thing. … The Founding Fathers were brilliant in putting the Constitution together and said, ‘Here’s a role for the federal government, but here’s a larger role even for the states.’”

Stitt, the Oklahoma governor, said he wants states to have more control of federal spending. Bypassing Washington, D.C.’s bureaucracy would give states more authority and stewardship over federal taxpayer dollars, he said, forcing states to live within their means and end incentives to freely accept federal dollars rather than lose them to another state.

“So we have to change that incentive, and I think that’s a reasonable way to do it,” he said in an interview. “Now, Oklahoma would handle our own roads, bridges, etcetera, and I just think that the incentive would be totally different, and there would truly be 50 laboratories of democracy.”

Stitt is chair of the bipartisan National Governors Association. He’s criticized Trump’s deployment of the National Guard into blue states. But he said presidents of both parties have wielded the growing might of the federal government to influence policies across the country.

He pointed to Trump’s efforts to kill already-approved offshore wind energy projects, and he highlighted the Keystone Pipeline extension, which was thwarted by Democratic Presidents Barack Obama and Joe Biden but embraced by Trump. He called those sorts of turnabouts “un-American.”

“We’re in a terrible situation if this continues to happen in our country,” he said. “This is like what we’ve made fun of in these Third World countries from dictator to dictator.”

Unlike Stitt, critics of a convention of the states fear it could result in a dramatic overhaul of the Constitution that would endanger core liberties and freedoms. And because the Constitution provides few rules for how a convention would work, they worry the process would be susceptible to influence by wealthy interests.

Adkins, the Council of State Governments CEO, said a convention of the states could become more likely as state-federal tensions increase. He said states should begin having dispassionate conversations about how they would respond if a convention is called, what it would look like, and who would be in charge.

“Those are a lot of questions that we just don’t know about,” Adkins said. “But that’s sort of the ultimate nuclear option for the states in a dysfunctional federal system.”

States are ‘better prepared’

Whether a convention of the states ever takes place, the conversation surrounding the idea underscores the depth of frustration with the current state-federal relationship.

Last year a Gallup survey found that 62% of Americans believe the federal government has too much power, the highest percentage recorded since 2002. It was also the first time since 2007 that Democrats were more likely than Republicans to say the federal government is too powerful.

But what happens once Trump leaves office? Will at least some anger at the federal government dissipate?

Trump is a very unpopular president when compared against the past four executives to hold the White House. His disapproval rating stood at 58% on July 2, according to a New York Times daily average of polling on the president. Just 39% of Americans approve of the job he’s doing, down from nearly 50% in the weeks after his inauguration in January 2025.

Kansas Gov. Laura Kelly, a Democrat, said the way Trump has pushed the envelope could become a new normal “if the wrong people get elected.” But few people who run for president want to bully states, she said.

“They’re not looking to be king. They’re not looking to be a dictator,” Kelly said. “And there is plenty to do just with the responsibilities and the authority that the federal government traditionally has that there’s no need to go that way.”

A presidential administration that makes clear it will give states as much leeway as possible as it advances its agenda will go far in rebuilding relationships between the states and the federal government, said former New Jersey Republican Gov. Christine Todd Whitman.

But if not, states have learned from the Trump era.

“The states know what the potential dangers are,” Whitman said, “and they’re getting better prepared.”

In the birthplace of the nation, Philadelphians this spring were gearing up for a raucous Independence Day celebration. But feelings were mixed in this liberal stronghold, said Pennsylvania House Speaker Joanna McClinton, a Democrat who represents parts of Philadelphia.

She said Trump misunderstands the distinct powers of the states and is “trampling the American order” by seeking to upend American federalism.

She and other Democrats in the closely divided commonwealth are trying to push back on the federal government through words and deeds.

But she said this administration hasn’t soured the excitement and pride in the American experiment. Republican and Democratic lawmakers were eager to participate in special sessions outside of Harrisburg this year in Philadelphia, where the founders signed both the Declaration of Independence and the U.S. Constitution.

“People recognize the challenges of the hour, and they make every effort to engage politically so we can get out of this mess,” she said. “But it doesn’t fully dampen the mood of being grateful for what this country still represents, and the potential that it still has.”

As election officials across the country steel themselves for the midterm elections in less than five months, President Donald Trump’s executive order restricting voting by mail threatens to upend their preparations.

The executive order instructs the U.S. Postal Service to refuse to deliver ballots in states that don’t provide lists of voters or meet other requirements. It has created a sense of deep uncertainty and concern among election officials as they consider how to comply, according to a review of court documents and interviews with election officials and experts on election administration.

The March 31 executive order, and a proposed Postal Service rule published June 2 that would put the order’s requirements into effect, raise serious logistical and procedural challenges for those running elections, they say. Rural areas with limited resources are especially at risk, but jurisdictions of all sizes could be forced to scramble.

The executive order is the latest step taken by Trump to assert control over state-run elections, along with the stalled SAVE America Act, which would require voters to provide documents proving their citizenship. The Justice Department, under Trump’s control, is also trying to obtain state voter rolls.

“This is just another death by a thousand cuts that clerks have been experiencing since the 2020 elections,” said Barb Byrum, the Democratic clerk of Ingham County, Michigan, which includes Lansing.

First-ever national voter list

The order and the rule require states to provide lists of mail-in voters if they want the Postal Service to deliver ballots, marking the first time the federal government has created a national voter list.

Mail ballot envelopes must meet certain design standards. And federal agencies have to compile lists of voting-age citizens to share with each state in an effort to root out noncitizen voters.

But Democratic states and voting rights groups argue the executive order — and the accompanying proposed rule — represent an illegal overreach by Trump because states administer elections under the U.S. Constitution. Trump and his Republican allies say the restrictions are necessary for election security and to combat noncitizen voting, which occurs extremely rarely.

The Postal Service didn’t respond to questions from States Newsroom. The agency has said the rule “will facilitate the faithful execution of federal law.”

Multiple lawsuits have been brought against the order, but a federal judge in Washington, D.C., in May declined to halt it, partly because the Trump administration hadn’t taken enough action to implement its requirements. Another federal judge in Massachusetts is weighing a separate request to block the order.

With the executive order still in effect, at least for now, election officials and experts who work with them are taking the ramifications of it and the proposed Postal Service rule seriously.

“We don’t have a national voter registration list. We don’t have, currently, a list of sanctioned, authorized voters to vote by mail at the federal level,” said Tammy Patrick, chief programs officer at Election Center, operated by the National Association of Election Officials. “That’s a big, big change in the way elections have always been conducted.”

Sweeping changes very quickly

In court papers filed in May, local election officials and local governments representing 26 jurisdictions across the country warned the executive order would “severely disrupt” local election administration and force the implementation of sweeping changes within months. Implementation of the order’s requirements will largely fall on local election officials, they argued.

Byrum was among the officials to sign onto the brief, along with others in Boston, and counties in Pennsylvania, Washington, Wisconsin and elsewhere.

Under the executive order, states that want to send ballots through the mail must provide the Postal Service with lists of voters they intend to provide a mail ballot. Local election officials will play a large role in helping states develop these lists, according to the court papers, and will have primary responsibility to help voters address any errors.

And Trump wants it all in place before November. The executive order’s proposed timelines “present a logistical nightmare for local election officials,” the officials warn.

“The general rule is don’t make changes before a big election because there’s always something you didn’t think about,” said Carolina Lopez, executive director of the Partnership for Large Election Jurisdictions, a nonpartisan organization for election officials in jurisdictions of at least 250,000 people.

The proposed Postal Service rule says the agency would launch a portal where states would submit voter lists and make updates. But a number of questions remain, said Lopez, who previously spent a decade administering elections in Miami-Dade County, Florida.

The portal poses the potential for bottlenecks in the election system and it’s unclear what would happen if it was ever offline. The United States has a decentralized election system, with states each running their own elections. By contrast, the Postal Service portal would create a single point of failure, raising concerns about the security of information on tens of millions of voters.

Additionally, while every state maintains a voter registration list, there is no nationwide standard for the formatting of that data. It’s unclear whether the portal will accept data in a variety of formats — the proposed rule only says the Postal Service wouldn’t alter the data provided by states.

“It looks a little different across the country and therefore normalizing the data will be a process,” Lopez said.

Struggle for small, rural counties

The Department of Justice initially said in a court document that the Department of Homeland Security planned to obtain voter data from the Postal Service before backpedaling a few days later. Still, Homeland Security continues to have “preliminary conversations” about data sharing, the Justice Department said in a subsequent court filing.

DHS operates the Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements, or SAVE, system that can scan voter data to identify possible noncitizens. The Justice Department has sued 30 states in an effort to force them to turn over their unredacted voter rolls, which include sensitive personal data such as dates of birth, driver’s license and full or partial Social Security numbers, for the purpose of running the information through SAVE.

The proposed Postal Service rule also imposes standards on ballot envelopes that states must meet if they want to send ballots through the mail.

Envelopes must include an election mail logo, be automation compatible and have a bar code that allows for tracking. These are already considered best practices — and many jurisdictions across the country already follow them — but the rule would make them mandatory.

Election offices in small, rural counties may struggle to comply. In many places, a single person is in charge of elections and may not even be on the job full time, Patrick said.

“There’s rural offices all across the country, some of them don’t have their own computer in their office — they are sharing it with the tax assessor or whatever — they don’t have the ability to generate those serialized tracking codes, intelligent mail bar codes,” Patrick said. “Because they’re physically hand-writing these envelopes out or they’re using a rubber stamp with their address on it.”

Neither the executive order or the proposed Postal Service rule include any federal funding for implementation, something that would likely have to be appropriated by Congress.

Some Republican states have championed the executive order. A dozen GOP state attorneys general filed court documents defending the order and arguing that it “will enhance the security of absentee voting.”

“It is vital to the strength of our republic that we ensure only American citizens vote in our elections and that mail-in and absentee ballots are secure and reliable,” South Carolina Attorney General Alan Wilson said in a statement earlier this spring.

But Matt Crane, a Republican who is the executive director of the Colorado County Clerks Association, said the executive order and the proposed rule mark an overreach by the federal government into duties best left to states and local governments.

The biggest reaction among Colorado clerks, he said, has been, “why?”

“No offense to our friends at the post office,” Crane said, “but I trust our processes more than I trust theirs.”

After Missouri lawmakers passed a gerrymandered congressional map this fall, opponents submitted more than 300,000 signatures seeking to force a statewide vote on whether to overturn the map. But Republican state officials say they will use the map in the meantime.

Missouri courts now appear likely to weigh in.

“If we need to continue to litigate to enforce our constitutional rights, we will,” said Richard von Glahn, a progressive activist who leads People Not Politicians, which is leading the campaign opposing the gerrymandered map.

As some states engage in an extraordinary redraw of congressional districts ahead of the 2026 midterm elections, state courts may decide the fate of the new maps. President Donald Trump has pushed Republican state lawmakers to gerrymander their states’ congressional maps, prompting Democratic state lawmakers to respond in kind.

Nationwide, state judges are poised to play a pivotal role in adjudicating legal challenges to the maps, which have been drafted to maximize partisan advantage for either Republicans or Democrats, depending on the state. Maps are typically only redrawn once a decade following the census.

While some state courts have long heard map-related lawsuits, the U.S. Supreme Court has all but taken federal courts out of the business of reviewing redrawn maps this year. On Dec. 4, a majority of the court allowed Texas’ new map, which seeks to secure five more U.S. House seats for Republicans, to proceed. A federal lawsuit against California’s new gerrymandered map, drawn to favor Democrats, hasn’t reached the high court.

The U.S. Supreme Court’s brief, unsigned majority decision voiced concern about inserting federal courts into an “active primary campaign,” though Texas’s primary election will occur in March. Critics of the court’s decision have said it effectively forecloses federal challenges to this year’s gerrymanders. The justices could also issue a decision next year that makes it more difficult to challenge maps as racially discriminatory.

State courts are taking center stage after gerrymandering opponents have spent decades encouraging them to play a more active role in policing maps that had been drawn for partisan advantage. Those efforts accelerated after the U.S. Supreme Court in 2019 limited the power of federal courts to block such maps.

“Basically, every one of the 50 states has something in its constitution that could be used to constrain partisan gerrymandering,” said Samuel Wang, director of the Princeton Gerrymandering Project.

State constitutions, which are interpreted by state supreme courts, typically have language that echoes the right to freedom of speech and association found in the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, Wang said. They also include a right to equal protection under the law, similar to the 14th Amendment.

Some state constitutions guarantee free and fair elections, language that doesn’t appear in the U.S. Constitution. Thirty states have some form of a constitutional requirement for free elections, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures.

At least 10 state supreme courts have found that state courts can decide cases involving allegations of partisan gerrymandering, according to a 2024 review by the State Democracy Research Initiative at the University of Wisconsin Law School.

So far this year, California, Missouri, North Carolina, Ohio, Texas and Utah have adopted new congressional maps. New maps also appear possible in Florida, Maryland and Virginia. A handful of other states — Alabama, Louisiana, New York and North Dakota — may have to change their maps depending on the outcome of court cases.

Some of those new or potential maps could face legal obstacles. Florida, New York and Ohio all have state supreme courts that have previously found problems with partisan gerrymanders. Maryland Democrats have so far not moved forward with a gerrymander, in part because of fears of an adverse decision from the state Supreme Court.

Four state supreme courts — including in Missouri — have determined that they cannot review partisan gerrymandering claims, though state courts may still consider challenges on other grounds, such as whether the districts are compact or contiguous.

In Missouri’s case, courts could also clear the way for a referendum vote over the new map, which is intended to force out U.S. Rep. Emanuel Cleaver, a Democrat who has represented Kansas City in Congress for the past two decades. Republicans currently hold six of the state’s eight congressional districts.

The map already faces a bevy of lawsuits, most notably over whether state officials must count some 103,000 referendum signatures gathered before the governor signed the map into law; at least 106,000 signatures are needed to send the map to voters.

Opponents of the new map have also filed lawsuits asserting the Missouri Constitution prevents redistricting without new census data and that an area of Kansas City was simultaneously placed into two separate congressional districts.

Missouri Republican Secretary of State Denny Hoskins’ decision this month (relying on an opinion from Missouri Republican Attorney General Catherine Hanaway) to implement the new congressional map, despite a submitted referendum petition, is expected to become the latest legal flashpoint. Opponents of the map argue it is now paused under state law.

Hoskins spokesperson Rachael Dunn said in a statement to Stateline that local election officials have until late July to verify referendum signatures — months after candidate filing ends March 31 and days before the Aug. 4 primary election. At that point, blocking the new map would be all but impossible, even if map opponents have gathered enough signatures to force a vote.

“Once signatures are all verified, the Secretary will certify the referendum based on constitutionality and verification,” Dunn wrote.

Hanaway’s office didn’t respond to questions.

Breaking out of lockstep

As federal courts limit their review of gerrymandering because of U.S. Supreme Court decisions, some state supreme courts are reluctant to wade into the issue because of a practice called “lockstepping.”

State supreme courts often interpret their state constitutions in line with — or in lockstep with — how the U.S. Supreme Court views similar language in the U.S. Constitution. Because the U.S. Supreme Court has declined to limit partisan gerrymandering, some state supreme courts have also declined to impose limits.

Gerrymandering opponents have used a variety of arguments over the years to try to prod state supreme courts out of lockstep. They have emphasized differences in wording between state constitutions and the federal one, and provisions in state constitutions — such as the free elections requirement — not found in the U.S. Constitution.

Sometimes these arguments work — and sometimes they don’t. The North Carolina Supreme Court in 2022 ruled against partisan gerrymandering. But after two Republicans were elected as justices that fall, the court reversed itself months later.

“Across the country, we have seen advocates turn to state supreme courts, and state courts in general, for state constitutional arguments against gerrymandering or voter suppression more broadly. And it’s been met with mixed success,” said Sharon Brett, a University of Kansas associate professor of law. In 2022 as litigation director of the American Civil Liberties Union of Kansas, she unsuccessfully argued a case before the state’s high court challenging Kansas’ congressional map.

In states where legislatures draw congressional maps, some lawmakers argue that state constitutions shouldn’t be interpreted to curb legislative authority over mapmaking. Court-imposed limits amount to violations of the traditional separation of powers, they say, with the judiciary overstepping its authority to interfere in politics.

“We expect them to be nonpartisan. We expect them to be unbiased. We expect them to be fair. We expect them to read the constitution and to protect or at least respect the separation of powers,” said Utah Republican state Rep. Casey Snider, speaking of Utah courts during a floor speech earlier this month.

In Utah, state courts waded through a yearslong legal battle over whether state lawmakers must adopt a non-gerrymandered map. After the Republican-controlled legislature repealed and replaced an independent redistricting process, the Utah Supreme Court last year ruled lawmakers had violated the state constitution.

A Utah district court judge in November then adopted a congressional map that will likely lead next year to the election of a Democrat. The state’s four congressional seats are currently all held by Republicans.

“What we would like is them to redistrict based on population — fairly,” Katharine Biele, president of the League of Women Voters of Utah, said of state lawmakers.

Republican Gov. Spencer Cox called the Utah legislature into special session earlier in December to respond to the judge’s decision. Lawmakers pushed back candidate filing deadlines in hopes that an appeal to the Utah Supreme Court will result in a decision overturning the judge’s adopted map.

They also passed a resolution condemning the judiciary.

Constitutional concerns

As the Indiana legislature weighed a gerrymandered map to boost Republicans this month, some lawmakers were reluctant to constrain state courts. Democrats currently hold two of the state’s nine congressional districts.

The GOP-controlled Indiana Senate voted down the map in a major setback to Trump’s national redistricting push. The vote came after a floor debate where opponents raised concerns about limiting court involvement; the legislation included a provision sending any legal challenge directly to the Indiana Supreme Court, bypassing a jury trial.

Indiana Republican state Sen. Greg Walker said the measure violated the state constitution, which guarantees an “inviolate” right to a jury trial in all civil cases. “In legal terms, ‘inviolate’ has the implication of being sacred, as opposed to being just a piece of the law,” Walker said on the floor.

State Sen. Mike Gaskill, a Republican who sponsored the map, said during a speech that Indiana residents would benefit from a quick process to resolve legal challenges. “Both sides, in any case, want them to be settled quickly so that they don’t cause chaos and interruptions in the elections process,” he said.

If the map had passed, opponents would have likely attacked the measure using a provision of the Indiana Constitution that requires “free and equal” elections.

Stateline reporter Jonathan Shorman can be reached at jshorman@stateline.org.

The U.S. Department of Justice has sent a confidential draft agreement to more than a dozen states that would require election officials to remove any alleged ineligible voters identified during a federal review of their voter rolls.

The agreement — called a memorandum of understanding, or MOU — would hand the federal government a major role in election administration, a responsibility that belongs to the states under the U.S. Constitution.

A Justice Department official identified 11 states that have expressed an interest in the agreement during a federal court hearing in December, according to a transcript reviewed by Stateline. Two additional states, Colorado and Wisconsin, have publicly rejected the memorandum of understanding and released copies of the proposal.

The 11 states “all fall into the list of, they have expressed with us a willingness to comply based on the represented MOU that we have sent them,” Eric Neff, the acting chief of the Justice Department’s Voting Section, said at the hearing. He spoke at a Dec. 4 hearing in a federal lawsuit brought by the Justice Department against California, which has refused a demand for the state’s voter data.

Neff’s courtroom disclosure, which Stateline is the first to report, comes as the Justice Department has sued 21 states and the District of Columbia for unredacted copies of their voter rolls after demanding the data from most states in recent months. The unredacted lists include sensitive personal information, such as driver’s license and partial Social Security numbers.

The states Neff identified are led by Republicans — Alabama, Mississippi, Missouri, Montana, Nebraska, South Carolina, South Dakota, Texas, Tennessee, Utah and Virginia.

The draft memorandum of understanding represents a new effort by the Trump administration to gain access to some states’ voter data without litigation.

The administration’s lawsuits mostly target Democratic states, where election officials refused initial requests for voter data and allege the demand is unlawful and risks the privacy of millions of voters. They have also voiced fears that the Trump administration could use the information to target its political enemies.

Neff said four states with Republican secretaries of state — Arkansas, Indiana, Kansas and Wyoming — have “complied voluntarily” with the Justice Department’s demand without memoranda of understanding.

The Justice Department says it needs voters’ detailed information to ensure ineligible people are kept off state voter rolls and that only citizens are voting.

Federal officials say they will follow federal privacy laws, but critics fear voter data is being shared with the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, which operates a powerful citizenship verification tool known as SAVE. The Trump administration has previously confirmed the Justice Department plans to share voter data with Homeland Security.

“What the DOJ is trying to do is something that should frighten everybody across the political spectrum,” said David Becker, executive director of the nonpartisan Center for Election Innovation & Research. “They’re trying to use the power of the executive branch to bully states into turning over highly sensitive data: date of birth, Social Security number, driver’s license — the holy trinity of identity theft.”

Becker, who worked as a senior trial attorney in the Justice Department’s Voting Section during the Clinton and George W. Bush administrations, told reporters on Dec. 8 that several states received the memorandum. But Neff’s identification of 11 states wasn’t widely available until the judge in the California lawsuit on Tuesday ordered the transcript of the Dec. 4 hearing immediately posted to the lawsuit’s public docket, where Stateline accessed it.

The draft memorandum of understanding, which is labeled “confidential,” outlines the terms of the proposed agreement between each state and the Justice Department. After a state provides its voter roll, the federal department would agree to test, analyze and assess the information. The department would then notify states of “any voter list maintenance issues, insufficiencies, inadequacies, deficiencies, anomalies, or concerns” found.

Each state would agree to “clean” its voter roll within 45 days by removing any ineligible voters, according to the memorandum. States would then resubmit their voter data to the Justice Department for verification.

While the Justice Department has demanded states’ voter rolls since this summer, the memorandum of understanding offers the most detailed picture to date of how the Trump administration plans to use the data.

“It lays out in a way that we haven’t seen in any other context their plan for one of the things, I will say, that they plan to do, which is disturbing,” said Eileen O’Connor, a senior counsel and manager in the voting rights and election program at the Brennan Center for Justice at New York University, a progressive think tank.

O’Connor was a trial attorney in the Justice Department’s Voting Section during the Obama, first Trump and Biden administrations. “I think with each passing lawsuit, they are clearly trying to create a national database of every voter in the country,” she said.

The Justice Department didn’t answer questions from Stateline about how many states had been sent the memorandum and whether any had signed it.

Assistant U.S. Attorney General Harmeet Dhillon, who leads the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division, wrote in a statement to Stateline that the department has a statutory mandate to enforce federal voting rights laws. Ensuring the voting public’s confidence in election integrity is a top priority of the Trump administration, she wrote.

“Clean voter rolls and basic election safeguards are requisites for free, fair, and transparent elections,” Dhillon wrote.

Federal involvement in elections

The Justice Department memorandum, if implemented, would mark a significant departure from how election officials typically maintain voter rolls.

States, often in coordination with local election officials, check lists for changes in address, deaths and other reasons for ineligibility, such as a felony conviction. States typically perform this task with little to no federal involvement.

Some states participate in voluntary programs that allow election officials to share voter information with other states for the purposes of looking for voters who may have moved or who are registered in multiple locations. But those don’t include the federal government, which plays a limited role in election administration under the United States’ decentralized approach to elections.

Matt Crane, executive director of the Colorado County Clerks Association, said clerks continually look at death records and other sources of data to update voter lists. He said the United States’ localized election system is a strength that guards against election interference.

“The federal government has no role in list maintenance,” Crane said.

But that has begun to change under the Trump administration, as President Donald Trump has made removing noncitizen voters a priority.

Earlier this year, Homeland Security overhauled the SAVE program into a tool that can scan millions of voter records against government databases for evidence of citizenship. The program was previously used for one-off searches to check whether noncitizens were eligible for government benefits.

Some Republican secretaries of state have agreed to upload their voter rolls into SAVE. Democratic secretaries of state object to using the program and say they are wary of what will happen to the voter information once it’s provided to the Trump administration, including its potential use by the Department of Homeland Security.

While SAVE can flag voters with potential eligibility issues, the onus now is still on state officials to investigate whether those voters are actually ineligible and decide whether to initiate a process to remove them from the rolls.

By contrast, the Justice Department memorandum would empower federal officials to take a more active role, allowing them to check the work of state election officials as they remove — or don’t remove — voters.

“We have a system that allows Americans to voice their opinions and to hold government accountable, and that is so fundamentally central to the way our system works,” Oregon Democratic Secretary of State Tobias Read, who has been sued by the Justice Department, said in an interview. “We should be focused on how to make that better, not on erecting artificial barriers and putting people’s privacy and confidence at risk for no reason.”

Republican interest

Some GOP election officials have welcomed the Trump administration’s interest and have accused the Biden administration of not doing enough to help states vet their voter rolls. In particular, they praise the overhaul of SAVE, which some GOP secretaries of state had requested before Trump took office.

Some secretaries have touted the removal of noncitizen voters after using SAVE. Wyoming Secretary of State Chuck Gray, a Republican, in November announced three voters identified as noncitizens had been removed from his state’s voter rolls. Gray has also provided the Justice Department with full access to Wyoming’s voter roll.

“The voter list maintenance that we have been conducting is extremely important for election integrity,” Gray said in a news release.

But as of early December, nearly all states hadn’t provided the Justice Department access to their unredacted voter rolls, with Neff identifying only four that had shared their lists. It also remains unclear whether any state has signed the memorandum of understanding. No state has told Stateline it signed the document.

Nebraska Secretary of State Robert Evnen, a Republican, has received a memorandum of understanding and plans to comply with the Justice Department request, pending the outcome of an ongoing lawsuit, Evnen spokesperson Rani Taborek-Potter wrote in an email to Stateline. A voting advocacy group has sued to block the release of the data.

In an interview with Kentucky Lantern, Kentucky Republican Secretary of State Michael Adams said that his office was “going back and forth a little bit” with the Justice Department over what federal law requires.

“We’ve not really figured out exactly where that line is of what-all they’re entitled to,” Adams said. “What’s not in dispute is they’re entitled to the vast majority of information — people’s names, addresses, birthdays — and we’ve given them all of that.”

Adams added that many state officials “are in the same boat of trying to figure out what exactly they need to do their job and what our obligations are legally.”

Utah Lt. Gov. Deidre Henderson, a Republican, confirmed in a statement to Stateline that her office received a proposed memorandum of understanding from the Justice Department. “We are in the process of reviewing the document with our attorneys and carefully considering our options,” Henderson wrote.

Rachael Dunn, a spokesperson for Missouri Republican Secretary of State Denny Hoskins, wrote in an email that the state hadn’t entered into an agreement with the Justice Department “at this time.”

DOJ ‘contractor’ could get voter data

The draft agreement would give the Justice Department wide authority to share the voter data of states that sign on.

The department would be authorized to share the data with “a contractor” who needs access “to perform duties related” to voter list maintenance verification, according to the draft agreement. The agreement doesn’t name any contractors or specify whether they would be inside or outside of government.

Two states have publicly rejected the draft agreement. Colorado Democratic Secretary of State Jena Griswold announced Dec. 3 she would refuse to sign the memorandum. The Justice Department later sued Colorado.

The Wisconsin Elections Commission also rejected the draft agreement that week. In a Dec. 11 letter to Neff, the Justice Department official, the commissioners wrote that state law prohibits them from releasing certain personally identifiable information, such as date of birth, Social Security numbers and driver’s license numbers.

“I don’t look at the action that we’re taking today to be commentary on the motive of the appropriateness of the Department of Justice’s request,” Commissioner Don Millis, a Republican appointee, said at a virtual commission meeting the same day. “The U.S. DOJ is simply asking the commission to do something that the commission is explicitly forbidden by Wisconsin law to do.”

The Justice Department on Thursday sued Wisconsin for its voter data.

Justin Levitt, who served as senior policy adviser for democracy and voting rights in the Biden White House and is now a law professor at Loyola Marymount University, told Stateline in an email that he expects no states to sign the agreement.

“It’s no surprise that both Colorado and Wisconsin said no — and I don’t think that’s a question of political leadership,” Levitt wrote. “It’s hard for me to imagine any Republican state with faith in its own list maintenance capacity agreeing to outsource that decision to the DOJ.”

(PDF)

Republicans could gain nearly 200 state legislative seats across the South if the U.S. Supreme Court guts a key provision of the federal Voting Rights Act, a new analysis finds.

The bulk of the gains would be concentrated in 10 GOP-controlled state legislatures in Southern states, according to the analysis, produced by Fair Fight Action, a Georgia-based progressive voting rights group, in partnership with Black Voters Matter Fund, which advocates on behalf of Black voters.

The analysis, featured in a report released by the groups on Monday, underscores the alarm among progressives over the potential consequences of the Supreme Court’s looming decision in a case known as Louisiana v. Callais. While the case centers on the constitutionality of Louisiana’s congressional map, the effects of the decision could extend into statehouses across the country.

The Supreme Court’s conservative majority appears likely to severely weaken Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act, a landmark 1965 civil rights law that bans racial discrimination in voting access. Section 2 restricts racial gerrymandering, and until now has limited the power of lawmakers to draw districts that dilute the voting power of racial minority voters.

A sweeping decision by the court could give state lawmakers a freer hand to draw congressional and state legislative districts that dilute the power of minority voters — as well as districts for local governments, such as county commissions, city councils and school boards. The justices held oral arguments in October; a decision could come at any time.

At the state legislative level, a court ruling that strikes down Section 2 could lead to Democrats losing about 191 seats, according to the analysis, which examined how state legislative districts could be redrawn if Section 2 is no longer in place. Most of those seats are currently held by Black lawmakers in districts where minority voters make up a majority of residents.

“What that is doing is providing a fatal blow to Black representation in the South,” Fair Fight Action CEO Lauren Groh-Wargo said in an interview.

The total number of state legislative districts in 10 Southern states where Black or Hispanic voters comprise a majority could fall from 342 to 202. Those states are Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi, North Carolina, South Carolina, Tennessee and Texas.

Some Republican states argue that courts have interpreted Section 2’s protections too broadly and in the process wrongly restrained the ability of lawmakers to draw favorable maps.

Alabama and 13 other GOP states said in a brief filed with the Supreme Court earlier this year that Section 2 has been turned into “the proverbial golden hammer, wielded by plaintiffs and courts in a never-ending search for a nail.”

If the Supreme Court weakens the Voting Rights Act, it’s unclear whether state legislatures would pursue mid-decade redraws of state legislative districts. Redistricting typically occurs every 10 years following the census.

At the federal level, a previous analysis by Fair Fight Action and Black Voters Matter Fund projected Republicans could draw an additional 19 U.S. House seats if Section 2 protections were removed.

While a few states have passed new congressional maps already this year, those efforts have proven highly controversial. Some states, such as Indiana and Kansas, have abandoned or rejected them for now.

Stateline reporter Jonathan Shorman can be reached at jshorman@stateline.org.