Scaling Back from Protecting Elections
The Trump administration is retreating from its responsibility to protect U.S. elections. State and local election officials no longer have a reliable partner in the federal government. And voters should not expect to have their voting rights vindicated by the DOJ.
Dismantling CISA
CISA is a component of the DHS responsible for helping to protect the cybersecurity and physical security of the nation’s critical infrastructure, including election systems. The agency provides voluntary, low-cost, and no-cost services, training, and assessments for state and local election officials across the country and helps these officials better understand the security threats their systems face.
The Trump administration severely undermined the structure and purpose of CISA in the president’s first few months in office. In February 2025, CISA put 17 of its election security staff on administrative leave. Additionally, DOGE fired 130 people from CISA; a judge later reinstated those employees to their positions, but they were immediately placed on administrative leave.
That same month, CISA paused all election security activities pending an internal review. The review was completed in March, but the Trump administration has refused to release the findings. It is unclear which CISA services have been restored, if any, despite repeated requests for information from members of Congress responsible for agency oversight. Reporting from April suggests that CISA is planning massive additional cuts.
In March 2025, CISA cut about $10 million in funding to the Center for Internet Security, a nonprofit with programs that benefit state and local election officials. As a result, funding was eliminated for the Election Infrastructure Information Analysis Center, a network that facilitates information sharing about security risks and best practices between election vendors and state and local election officials, and was reduced for the Multi-State Information and Analysis Center, a similar network that serves all state and local government entities.
Impact: Scaling back the expertise at CISA and cutting the critical funding it delivers to state and local officials for election security expose U.S. election infrastructure to cyberattacks and physical attacks, leaving election officials with less support to anticipate or recover from these attacks and to run safe and secure elections.
Why It’s Wrong: CISA’s dismantling occurs at a time when there are aggressive threats to our election system from foreign and domestic actors. Cyberattacks may also become more effective with the evolution of artificial intelligence.
Additionally, a federal judge found that the firing of CISA employees was illegal under the Administrative Procedure Act for failure to follow federal law and regulations. The employees were reinstated. Despite the ruling, however, CISA managed to accomplish the same outcome, a diminished workforce, by immediately placing those reinstated employees on administrative leave.
Status: In the absence of federal assistance, state and local officials can set up new interagency working groups on election security — initiatives that states have taken in past election cycles — as well as expand interstate information-sharing networks. States can also pass and enforce laws to protect election workers and infrastructure.
Directing the DOJ to Endanger Voting Rights Rather Than Protect Them
Shortly after being appointed to run the DOJ’s civil rights division, Assistant Attorney General Dhillon announced and implemented a “paradigm shift” that shirks the department’s responsibility to protect voting rights. While Dhillon describes the “usual approach” of previous Republican administrations as working to “slow the train down,” she envisions the division “turning the train around and driving in the opposite direction” under her leadership. Shortly after taking the helm, she also issued new mission statements that signal the division’s move away from protecting the rights of marginalized groups and toward efforts such as rooting out voter fraud, which is actually extremely rare. Project 2025 had proposed such a shift, also reflected in the president’s executive order on elections.
“The Trump administration has signaled that it is unlikely to enforce laws to protect voting rights.”
The DOJ has since dropped every voting case in which it had been a plaintiff at the start of this administration, and it has withdrawn its involvement in several other voting and redistricting suits. It also gutted the civil rights division of its career staff. By the end of May 2025, an estimated 250 attorneys making up approximately 70 percent of the division’s lawyers had left the department. The staff of the division’s voting section dwindled from approximately 30 lawyers down to about 6. But the division has begun hiring new attorneys. The voting section is now led by Maureen Riordan, a longtime DOJ lawyer who rejoined the department after a stint at the Public Interest Legal Foundation (PILF), a conservative organization that has for years sued election officials to try to force aggressive purges of the voter rolls.
Under Riordan, the DOJ sued election administrators in North Carolina in an apparent attempt to prompt a purge of thousands of eligible voters from the rolls. The department also sued an Orange County, California, election official for failing to provide the department unredacted private information concerning voters he had removed from the rolls; the official had previously provided redacted records to ensure voter privacy, but the department did not agree with the redaction. The DOJ also filed statements of interest in Oregon and Illinois in support of another conservative activist organization’s lawsuits seeking more aggressive voter roll purges. And it issued letters to state election administrators in at least six other states —Alaska, Arizona, Colorado, Minnesota, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin — identifying purported failures to satisfy federal laws governing voter list maintenance.
Impact: The Trump administration has signaled that it is unlikely to enforce laws to protect voting rights. That leaves voters particularly vulnerable in the seven states in the middle of the country that make up the Eighth Circuit, where the court of appeals recently ruled that only the DOJ can bring suits to enforce the Voting Rights Act’s central prohibition against discrimination against racial and language minorities. The ruling bars private plaintiffs such as voters and advocacy groups, who have historically brought the vast majority of these cases, from filing suit. Unless the Supreme Court overturns that ruling, voters in these seven states (Arkansas, Iowa, Minnesota, Missouri, Nebraska, North Dakota, and South Dakota) will essentially be left without the primary protections of the landmark civil rights law.
At the same time, the department’s new focus on litigation to press for more aggressive purges poses a threat to election administration and voters alike. Aggressive purges risk disenfranchising eligible voters, as evidenced by the department’s suit in North Carolina. As many as 200,000 North Carolina voter registration records are missing a driver’s license number or the last four digits of a Social Security number, a result of the state voter registration form’s poor design and likely mistakes in data management. These are errors by the state, not the voters themselves; moreover, the omission of these numbers from voter records indicates nothing about the eligibility of these people to vote. But the DOJ’s suit against North Carolina purportedly aimed at fixing the state’s mistakes asks for relief that would result in the removal of many of these voters from the rolls.
PILF and other groups have tried to force voter roll purges through lawsuits, and they have been unsuccessful in court time and again. That is because while federal law requires election officials to conduct “reasonable” voter list maintenance, it does not mandate a particular program for removing voters, nor does it require the removal of voters for mistakes in their records that are no fault of their own and indicate nothing about their eligibility.
Successful or not, these suits also feed a false narrative that U.S. elections are rife with fraud and provide fodder for attempts at overturning results. The DOJ’s suit in North Carolina follows a months-long attempt by a losing North Carolina Supreme Court candidate to reverse his defeat by using the same missing information in the state’s rolls to justify throwing out the validly cast votes of tens of thousands of eligible voters. The DOJ’s pursuit of cases like this one could lend legitimacy to similar election subversion efforts in the future.
Such suits also could provide cover for election officials to take bad-faith actions that would disenfranchise voters. Dozens of election officials around the country are themselves election deniers. They could use a suit by the DOJ as justification for purging thousands of voters from the rolls or applying a fringe legal interpretation to a federal law.
Why It’s Wrong: The DOJ has statutory duties to enforce federal laws that ensure greater access to the ballot box for all eligible Americans, including duties set out in the Civil Rights Acts, the Voting Rights Act of 1965, the Voting Accessibility for Elderly and Handicapped Act of 1984, the Uniformed and Overseas Citizens Absentee Voting Act of 1986, the National Voter Registration Act of 1993, and the Help America Vote Act of 2002.
Status: The administration is still bound by the Constitution and the law. The abovementioned laws remain in full effect, and, despite the Eighth Circuit’s rogue ruling concerning the Voting Rights Act, many of them allow private enforcement through suits by voters and advocates. Private plaintiffs can and should bring legal challenges under federal law. Additionally, none of the new cases filed by the DOJ’s voting section have advanced to a decision in the courts, but organizations like the Brennan Center are seeking to intervene where appropriate to ensure that, when the courts do rule, voters’ interests are represented.