December 28, 2025

2025 was the year of attacks on free and fair elections. But the prior four years were full of missed opportunities.

In his first year back in office, Donald Trump issued sweeping executive orders targeting voting rights. He asserted the power to control how states run their elections and which ballots are counted or rejected. He wasn’t alone in this effort. The Republican Party has asked the Supreme Court to gut the Voting Rights Act, remove limits on campaign finance, and throw out lawful mail-in ballots.

But none of these actions is as damaging as what the voting rights section of his Department of Justice is doing. Not even close.

For the last several months, the DOJ has requested, cajoled and threatened state election officials to turn over their states’ most sensitive voting information. When states refused, the DOJ sued them.

In 2025, the DOJ filed 25 voting-related lawsuits. Twenty-two targeted states refused to turn over the personal information contained in their voter rolls. The remaining three lawsuits also involved voter data, including a recent lawsuit against Fulton County, Georgia, seeking information related to the 2020 election.

To put this in perspective: during the two years of the last presidential election cycle, Joe Biden’s DOJ filed a total of five voting cases. The 25 cases filed this year alone are a multiple of the total number filed during Biden’s entire four-year term.

I never doubted Biden’s commitment to voting rights and democracy. As president, he spoke on the topic with passion and conviction. He worked with congressional Democrats to enact several pro-voting measures, including the Freedom to Vote Act and the John R. Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act. Both failed due to unified Republican opposition to protecting free and fair elections.

But under Attorney General Merrick Garland, the department focused on norms. Launching a barrage of pro-voting lawsuits was never going to be acceptable to a man who worried excessively about appearing partisan. As I have written before, Garland erroneously brought norms to a Trump fight.

I don’t believe many in the Biden administration truly believed Trump was an aspiring autocrat. The president and vice president did, but that understanding never seemed to filter down to the policy and operational levels of the administration.

In the summer of 2023, it was reported that some in the White House had “soured” on my aggressive approach to protecting democracy in court. They argued that my “approach may be emotionally satisfying and make for good headlines,” but that “the president’s team wants to be more selective in picking legal fights.”

It is no accident that the DOJ filed so few voting cases during those two years. It reflected a judgment by the White House and DOJ that adherence to norms was paramount, that litigation could be divisive, and that figures like me were too partisan.

It is likewise no surprise that the Trump administration has taken a very different approach.

Autocrats rule by imposing their will on the people they govern. They seek to enrich themselves and their families at the expense of their citizenry. They reward their friends and punish their enemies. They co-opt institutions of civil society, the law and the media.

Most importantly, every autocrat must immunize themselves from popular backlash. In countries with histories of representative government, that means ensuring elections are not so free or fair as to threaten their power.

To preserve democracy, it is essential for Democrats to fight Trump’s power grabs in 2026.

My law firm and I are already litigating more than 75 voting and election cases in nearly 40 states. We have intervened to oppose all 22 of the DOJ’s voter-file cases, as well as the lawsuit against Fulton County. Earlier this month, I argued one of the Supreme Court cases being advanced by the GOP. In the spring, I will likely argue another.

With hard work by lawyers, nonprofits, activists and the Democratic Party, we will protect free and fair elections in 2026 and 2028. But that is not enough.

In January 2029, Democrats will hopefully again find themselves in a position of power in the White House. A new president will need to choose an attorney general and decide how forcefully to defend voting rights.

The institutionalists in the party will likely insist that the new chief executive return to a system of norms. They will argue that the DOJ must be restored to its nonpartisan tradition. They will pressure the president to select someone with government experience. Perhaps they will even suggest a former judge.

Those of us in the pro-democracy movement must insist on a different path. After nearly a decade of election denialism and four years of Donald Trump, the next DOJ must be willing to embrace its full power to protect democracy and free and fair elections. That means ignoring the institutionalists and dismissing critics who will claim that a DOJ focused on advancing the rights of voters is engaged in improper partisan behavior.

We are still a long way from 2029. We have an enormous mountain to climb simply to protect the 2026 midterms. But as we do that vital work, we cannot lose sight of how we got here, what the other side is doing, and what we must do in the future to ensure we never land back here again.