When a new administration moves to Washington, DC, there are always changes in policy priorities and personnel. Alex, a lawyer in the Department of Justice’s Voting Section, had survived Donald Trump’s first term, and thought he could make it through the second.
Within hours of the president’s inauguration, he knew he had misjudged the situation.
“I was just wrong,” he says. “It was wildly different than the first Trump administration. There was just a sense that this was not going to be the same. And then in the Voting Section, what happened is they just started dismissing cases.”
The Voting Section was established in the agency’s Civil Rights Division following the landmark Voting Rights Act of 1965 to ensure every American had an equal right to vote.
Alex, whose name has been changed to protect his identity, is one of dozens of lawyers who has been ousted from it since Trump’s return to the White House.
There were around 30 attorneys in the Voting Section when Trump was inaugurated in January 2025. Three months later, only two remained. The departing lawyers have since been replaced by half a dozen new hires with little federal court experience who have made a litany of basic errors in court filings. They have also appeared more than willing to comply with Trump’s anti-voting directives, filing dozens of lawsuits in a bid to force states to hand over unredacted voter rolls.
WIRED spoke to a dozen experts and former Voting Section lawyers about the wholesale destruction of the Justice Department’s Voting Section under Trump. Many spoke on the condition of anonymity due to fear of retaliation from the Trump administration.
As the November midterms loom, multiple sources tell WIRED that the damage done to the DOJ’s Voting Section may be irreversible. They worry that the ultimate goal is to provide Trump with so-called evidence to wrest control of elections from the states. “I think long-term, it's about generating fodder to challenge or undermine elections,” says Alex, who worked at the Voting Section for many years.
“They've turned what was previously the crown jewel of the Civil Rights Division, the Voting Section, into a weapon against voters,” Michelle Kanter Cohen, policy director and senior counsel at the Fair Elections Center, tells WIRED. “This used to be a section that enforced people's voting rights, that worked against intimidation, that enforced federal voting laws meant to protect people from discrimination and meant to make voting fair and accessible. It is being turned into a political tool to further conspiracy theories of the Trump administration.”
Former lawyers from the Voting Section agree. “I spent eight years in the Voting Section as a trial attorney doing what was the bread-and-butter work of the section ever since it was created, which was enforcing the Voting Rights Act and the other federal statutes that protect the right to vote,” Eileen O’Connor, who is now senior counsel at the nonprofit Brennan Center for Justice, tells WIRED. “The work that they're doing now is the opposite.”
The White House did not respond to requests for comment about the new Voting Section lawyers, but spokeswoman Abigail Jackson told WIRED that “the Civil Rights Act, National Voting Rights Act, and Help America Vote Act all give the Department of Justice full authority to ensure states comply with federal election laws, which mandate accurate state voter rolls.”
Voting Rights
In the days and weeks after the 2020 presidential election, Trump sought to weaponize the Justice Department by appointing special counsels to investigate election conspiracy theories. It didn’t work. At every turn, officials and political appointees at the department pushed back, even threatening mass resignations.
Now Trump is once again seeking to use the power of the Justice Department to undermine trust in the election process. This time around, sources tell WIRED, there is no one pushing back.
A few weeks into Trump’s second term, on February 4, 2025, the Senate confirmed Pam Bondi as attorney general. The following day, she issued a series of memos to all lawyers in the Justice Department. Alex remembers the day well: “We got a batch of emails everyone called the Bondi blasts, most notably one that said that everyone needed to be zealously representing the president's policies,” he recalls. (The actual wording of the document calls for DOJ lawyers to be “zealously advocating” for the president.)
Alex and other lawyers who spoke to WIRED say the Voting Section quickly felt the brunt of those policies.
Jamie, a former lawyer at the Voting Section who left in 2025, says the last year has been “unlike anything anyone had ever seen.”
“I was asked to dismiss one of my cases in the very first week of the administration,” they say. “And that kept happening until there were no active cases anymore for the Voting Section and almost no active cases for the entire division.”
The president’s priorities became even more clear on March 25, 2025, when Trump signed an executive order titled “Preserving and Protecting the Integrity of American Elections.” The order outlined how the administration was planning to collect unredacted voter rolls from states and share the information with the Department of Homeland Security and Elon Musk’s so-called Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE. The sharing of this data across agencies was unprecedented.
In April 2025, the Senate confirmed the appointment of Harmeet Dhillon as the assistant attorney general in charge of the DOJ’s Civil Rights Division, which oversees the Voting Section. Dhillon has advocated for Trump in his claims that the 2020 election was stolen. She also pushed back on what she claimed was government overreach during the first year of the Covid pandemic, and in a series of posts on X even questioned the attack on representative Nancy Pelosi’s husband in 2022, noting the security presence around members of Congress and their partners.
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Under Dhillon, the Voting Section released a new mission statement. The statement, Alex says, “doesn't really mention Voting Rights Act work. It's all about implementing the executive order, protecting voter integrity and transparency, [but] not enforcing the statutes Congress has charged the Civil Rights Division to enforce.”
The timing of Dhillon’s appointment lined up with the deferred resignation program that was offered to tens of thousands of federal workers during DOGE’s rampage. While thousands of employees left the Justice Department, former section lawyers tell WIRED that they believe Dhillon felt resignations were not happening quickly enough. So she came up with a new way of forcing out senior leadership.
On April 25, 2025, Dhillon sent letters to senior managers in the section, informing them that they were being temporarily transferred to the Justice Department’s complaint adjudication office. As one recipient of the letter described it to WIRED, “Mostly it’s Bureau of Prisons guard complaints about promotions, hiring, and firing, and Americans with Disabilities Act concerns. That is not my expertise.” WIRED reviewed a copy of the letter, which features Dhillon’s signature.
The letter worked, and the entire Voting Section’s leadership resigned. Most of the people leaving had worked there for many years, including at least two lawyers who had been there since the 1980s.
“You will never have people with that level of institutional and encyclopedic knowledge of both the external and the internal precedents, the things that kept the Voting Section always credible, always inside the lines,” says Alex. “That's just gone. It’s just deeply sad.”
Over the course of the next six months, Dhillon and her team remade the Voting Section, replacing seasoned attorneys with a cadre that had spent years working against the very department they were now joining.
Among the first recruits to Dhillon’s new division was Michael Gates, who joined as a deputy attorney general in February 2025 and worked on the efforts to secure voter rolls. He lasted less than a year. The Orange County Register reported at the time that Gates was “terminated for cause,” with a Justice Department source telling the outlet that Gates was accused of creating a hostile work environment for multiple women in the office. Gates disputed the reporting, telling the outlet he had resigned and that he planned to pursue legal action against the DOJ division. In January, Gates announced his campaign to be California’s next attorney general.
Dhillon also appointed Maureen Riordan as the acting chief of the Voting Section. Riordan had previously spent two decades at the DOJ, including time as a trial attorney in the Voting Section, before leaving several years ago. She went to work for the Public Interest Legal Foundation, a right-wing legal group that has spent years seeking to obtain voter rolls by filing lawsuits against election officials. Riordan also lasted less than a year at the Voting Section, and left her role this winter.
Eric Neff took over from Riordan as acting head of the department at some point in December, according to an archived version of the DOJ’s own website. In 2025, Neff briefly served on the legal team representing prominent election denier Patrick Byrne, and authored an article raising questions about Dominion voting machines.
Other Dhillon hires include David Vandenberg, who was reportedly let go from a previous position as assistant district attorney in El Paso, Texas, after allegations of numerous complaints about unprofessional behavior. Before Brittany Bennett joined the Voting Section last year, her only election experience was filing an amicus brief on behalf of the Georgia GOP in a 2024 lawsuit that sought to ban the use of Dominion voting machines. The lawsuit was supported by an affidavit from Clay Parikh, whose election conspiracy claims have been cited in several other lawsuits.
Megan Frederick joined as a trial attorney in December after stints at the conservative America First Policy Institute think tank. (In 2015, when Frederick was working as a commonwealth attorney in Culpeper County, Virginia, a judge ruled she had committed civil battery of an IT systems administrator.) Both Frederick and Christopher Gardner, another Voting Section hire, represented Trump in separate 2020 attempts to undermine the election, as did Joseph Voiland, a lawyer who worked on behalf of the Trump campaign in its attempts to throw out ballots in that year’s race. Voiland was first listed as a Voting Section lawyer in February, when he was named counsel on the lawsuit to force Wisconsin to hand over unredacted voter rolls.
Dhillon and the newly hired attorneys in the Voting Section did not respond to requests for comment. “The Department of Justice has full confidence in the Voting Section and its experienced attorneys to enforce federal voting rights laws and ensure our elections remain free, fair, and transparent,” Natalie Baldassarre, a Justice Department spokesperson, tells WIRED.
Writing Class
For the lawyers who spent decades in the Voting Section, the difference between today and just a year ago is like night and day.
“The DOJ was where the best lawyers went to practice on behalf of the American people,” says David Becker, the head of the Center for Election Innovation and Research, who also worked as a senior trial attorney in the Voting Section. “When I got to the DOJ, I felt incredibly privileged, and I was working with some of the best lawyers I had ever seen in my life ... The only criteria for working there now is loyalty to the president.”
Mistakes in the office now happen constantly. In a May letter sent to the Colorado secretary of state, the DOJ requested access to “records pertaining to the November 2000 federal election,” when they likely meant the 2020 election. In August, the DOJ sent a letter to the New Hampshire secretary of state seeking voter records which cited the wrong provision of the Help America Vote Act. In January, it filed a lawsuit in the wrong federal court in Georgia, and the judge dismissed the action. In February, the agency filed a lawsuit seeking New Jersey’s voter rolls in which they misspelled Governor Mikie Sherrill’s last name five out of eight times she was mentioned.
In March, it was revealed that lawyers at the DOJ had spent months emailing the wrong address while seeking information on voter rolls in Oklahoma. And last month, a judge in Washington state demanded to know why Voting Section lawyers had improperly served their lawsuit and missed a crucial deadline. The judge also questioned whether the lawsuit was served in a different way than outlined by the DOJ, and if so, why the lawyers had made “inaccurate representation” to the court. In another filing in late February, lawyers seeking sensitive voting data misspelled the words “voters,” “emergency,” and “United States” in a single filing.
“They don't engage in the attention to detail and refined practice that you expect from the people in this office,” says Alex.
In an apparent bid to fix the problem, the Civil Rights Division asked its lawyers to attend a "writing course" in February, according to three people with knowledge of the matter, including one current DOJ lawyer. The course was offered to all lawyers at the Civil Rights Division, but recent hires were particularly encouraged to take part. The course was designed to improve the quality and persuasive language of filings from the division. One source referred to it as a remedial writing course. Becker and O’Connor say that in all their time at the DOJ they were never required to take such a course.
The DOJ confirmed the writing course took place, but said that no one lawyer was singled out or required to attend.
None of this has stopped the newly remade office from focusing almost exclusively on a single goal: forcing states to hand over unredacted versions of their voter rolls, which contain sensitive personal information such as Social Security numbers and driver’s licences.
In total, the group has filed lawsuits against 30 states and the District of Columbia, all of which have refused to volunteer the information. In February, the DOJ expanded its campaign to five new states, filing lawsuits against Utah, Oklahoma, Kentucky, West Virginia and New Jersey. Aside from Oklahoma, which settled its case, the lawsuits haven’t yet been successful; the five federal courts who have ruled on cases in Michigan, Oregon, California, Massachusetts, and Rhode Island have all granted a motion to dismiss or reject the lawsuits.
The DOJ has not stated clearly what it wants to do with the data it collects, but the Trump administration has sought to expand the SAVE program, which has traditionally been used to check citizen eligibility for benefits access, to purge their voter rolls.
In rejecting the DOJ’s lawsuit, California district judge David Carter plainly stated: “It appears that the DOJ is on a nationwide quest to gather the sensitive, private information of millions of Americans for use in a centralized federal database.”
These lawsuits have become undeniably connected to wild conspiracy theories. In December, Dhillon, Neff, and Bennett filed a lawsuit seeking 2020 election records from Fulton County in Georgia. That lawsuit was filed a month before the unprecedented raid on the Fulton County election offices by the FBI where agents seized 2020 ballots, based on a search warrant that originated with a tip referencing long-debunked conspiracy theories about election interference.
“What they're doing right now is based on those conspiracy theories,” Dax Goldstein, director of the election protection program at the nonpartisan election integrity group States United Democracy Center, tells WIRED. “False theories that there are noncitizens who are voting at high rates in our elections, false theories about what happened in 2020 in Fulton County. It's so deep in their bones. I think importing those beliefs is the point of having those people in the DOJ, and there's no shame about it. This is just how it's operating now.”
With the midterms just eight months away, Goldstein and other election law experts WIRED spoke to all agreed that the lawsuits filed by the Voting Section these days are based on a flawed understanding of the law. But ultimately, they say, that doesn’t matter.
“All of these things are untrue, but they're all designed to undercut faith in our elections so that they can control the way that elections are run in ways that are responsive to Trump's policy objectives,” says Goldstein.
Former Voting Section attorneys now believe the current administration is trying to not only control how elections are run, but provide a plausible excuse to contest the outcome of the midterms.
“They're trying to exercise an authority they don't have to try to interfere with elections now, but also to lay the groundwork to be able to call into doubt the results of an election,” says O’Connor. “I would hate to ever say that the damage is irreparable, but the damage is massive and will take a very long time to rebuild it.”
