DATA: With Trump’s offensive DOJ, are pro-voting groups too busy playing defense to attack anti-voting laws?

In his second term, President Donald Trump has led a multipronged war on democracy, directing his lieutenants to turn agencies that once defended free and fair elections into weapons of voter suppression. But on every front so far, Trump has been met by voting rights advocates, who have marshalled facts and the law to win many critical lawsuits.

Those courtroom battles have often checked Trump’s attempts to undermine the Constitution. But have they kept democracy defenders too busy to launch legal counter offensives — i.e. convince judges to strike down restrictive voting laws? 

To find out, Democracy Docket tracked the number of pro- and anti-voting lawsuits launched in off-cycle years — 2021, 2023 and 2025 — between federal elections. (Election years see a spike in lawsuits by both parties trying to gain an upper hand in their races or challenge disappointing results.)

We labeled lawsuits that sought to force election officials to purge voter registration rolls or block state laws aimed at making it easier to vote, like universal mail-in ballots, as anti-voting. Pro-voting lawsuits were those challenging laws that made it harder to vote — like English-only voting instructions or voter ID requirements. Other lawsuits related to elections, like redistricting fights, were not counted. 

We found that anti-voting lawsuits have proliferated from eight in 2021, to 19 in 2023 and then jumping to 43 last year — thanks, in large part, to the Department of Justice (DOJ) filing 25 lawsuits demanding access to voter registration rolls in 2025. (The DOJ filed another seven lawsuits in 2026, leaving 32 active lawsuits, including one paused and another under a consent decree.) 

At the same time, pro-voting lawsuits jumped from 32 in 2021 to 51 in 2023, before falling to 27 in 2025. Put another way, pro-voting litigation went from 80% of all voting lawsuits filed in 2021 to just 38.6% in 2025. 

At first blush, those figures seemed to suggest that pro-voting groups were too busy playing defense — defending against the onslaught of anti-voting lawsuits driven by the DOJ — to go on the offense against voter suppression. 

But the lawyers leading these litigation campaigns say that’s not a concern. 

“I don’t think it’s because of the lack of capacity,” said Jon Greenbaum, founder of Justice Legal Strategies and former chief counsel at the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights. “I have been involved in voting stuff since ‘97 and on the nonprofit scene since 2004 – the resources of nonprofit groups in the voting rights space is the greatest that it’s ever been.” 

“I wouldn’t say that voter suppression laws are slipping through the fence,” said Lis Frost, litigation chair at Elias Law Group.*

According to Frost, the recent drop in pro-voting lawsuits can be attributed to a relative dearth of targets. 

“We litigated so many bad laws in prior cycles — and we were quite successful — that there’s just not as many laws to target as there have been in the past,” Frost said.

Most of these lawsuits — whether pro- or anti- voting — target new state laws. But, Frost said, “we’re not seeing the same kind of large volume of anti-voter legislation coming out of the [state] legislatures,” like in 2021, after Trump’s lies about the 2020 election. 

And Trump’s own actions in office might have taken the pressure off of state lawmakers, Frost said. Between his attempted executive order, the DOJ’s voter roll lawsuits, and the campaign to pass the SAVE America Act, it appears as though voting issues are being handled at the federal level, leaving state Republicans free to pursue other legislative priorities. 

“Part of the reason we’re not seeing the volume of anti-voter legislation we’ve seen in the past is because we have an executive who is attempting to do it by fiat,” said Frost.

And while some Republican lawmakers have explored following Trump’s loud and frequent demands to Congress for requiring voters to provide documentary proof of citizenship (DPOC), by passing state laws to do the same, Frost said the Ninth Circuit and U.S. Supreme Court’s rulings in RNC v. Mi Familia Vota in 2024 — which struck down an Arizona law requiring DPOC to vote in federal elections — had impeded those efforts.  

Moreover, as Greenbaum noted, simply counting cases to get a sense of what side of an issue is more active can also be misleading. The three separate lawsuits challenging Trump’s March, 2025 executive order on elections were consolidated into one successful lawsuit with dozens of pro-voting plaintiff organizations represented by even more lawyers from legal nonprofits, law firms*, and academic institutions. (Democratic-led states also sued in a pair of lawsuits to block the order).

And if Trump issues another executive order — as he has said he would — those groups would all sue again to block it, said Greenbaum. 

His concern is what happens if the administration attempts some widespread election interference action — like ordering federal agents to seize ballots in multiple states or deploying troops to polls in every major city, despite federal statutes prohibiting that. 

“That sort of thing is much more challenging to be able to figure out how to respond against,” Greenbaum said. 

But, he added, groups like his were already coordinating with others on identifying potential methods Trump and his MAGA allies in state or local government might try to disrupt elections, and coming up with gameplans to counter them. 

“You’re constantly trying to think about what things the Trump administration may do. They are unprecedented things and in the past, nobody would have thought about doing them,” Greenbaum said. “But we have to prepare ourselves for anything at this point. Nothing’s beyond the pale.”

*Democracy Docket founder Marc Elias is chair of the Elias Law Group (ELG). ELG represents parties in a number of lawsuits mentioned in this report, including Democratic party plaintiffs challenging Trump’s executive order on elections. 

Ashley Cleaves contributed to this report.