Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro speaks with reporters and editors in Washington, D.C., on Jan. 29, 2026. (Photo by Ashley Murray/States Newsroom)
WASHINGTON — Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro is preparing a response should the Trump administration surge federal immigration agents into the commonwealth, he said Thursday in Washington, D.C.
Recent deadly shootings of two Minneapolis residents by federal agents compelled the Democratic governor “to let the good people of Pennsylvania know my views on this, where I stand, and also let them know that I’m going to protect them,” he said.
Shapiro declined to provide details, saying it would “not be prudent” to share specifics on whether a response would be a law enforcement operation or confined to challenging the administration in the courtroom.
“We’re prepared on every level now. If the president of the United States seeks to impose his will, and the federal will, on our commonwealth, there may be some things that we can’t stop, but I can tell you, we’ve learned from the good example in other states,” Shapiro said, citing actions by other Democratic governors in California, Illinois, Minnesota and Maine.
D.C. stop for presidential hopefuls
Shapiro delivered the comments during an intimate brunch with the Washington press corps hosted by The Christian Science Monitor. The Monitor routinely hosts press events with elected officials and newsmakers, and has historically been a stop on the circuit for presidential hopefuls.
Shapiro brushed aside questions about a possible presidential bid in 2028, instead saying he’s running for reelection this year and believes that “no one should be looking past these midterms.”
“I don’t think we should be thinking about anything other than curtailing the chaos, the cruelty and the corruption of this administration, and the best way for voters to do that is by showing up in record numbers,” Shapiro said.
The Pennsylvania executive also expressed he is “deeply concerned” about the administration’s efforts to undermine the election.
“The administration demanded that I turn over all of the voter rolls for our commonwealth. We have roughly 9 million voters. … I have a legal responsibility to protect that information. I also do not trust this administration to use that for anything other than nefarious purposes, and so I refuse to share that information. They’ve sued us, and we’ll see them in court,” he said.
The Trump administration has sued more than 20 states to date for voter roll data, including personally identifying information, according to the Brennan Center for Justice. The administration has said it plans to share the data with the Department of Homeland Security to search for noncitizens.
Among the states targeted alongside Pennsylvania: Arizona, Colorado, Georgia, Maine, Maryland, Michigan, Minnesota, Nevada, New Hampshire, New Mexico, Oregon, Virginia, Washington and Wisconsin.
New book
Shapiro told reporters he attended Thursday’s event to promote his new book, titled “Where We Keep the Light: Stories from a Life of Service,” which features stories about his faith, the process of being vetted as a potential 2024 vice presidential candidate for Democratic nominee Vice President Kamala Harris, and the “dark moment” in April 2025 when a lone man set fire to the governor’s mansion in an attempt on Shapiro’s life.
“We have to acknowledge political violence has been an issue for generations. I think it is also true that over the last several years, we’ve seen a rise,” he said, citing the recent attack on U.S. Rep. Ilhan Omar, D-Minn., the killings of former Minnesota House Speaker Melissa Hortman and her husband, Mark, and of conservative activist Charlie Kirk, as well as the assassination attempts of President Donald Trump on the campaign trail.
Elected leaders, he said, have a “responsibility to speak and act with moral clarity and to condemn that violence regardless of who’s targeted.”
“I must say, when the president of the United States fails to condemn acts of political violence because they’re targeting someone that he dislikes or disagrees with, that makes us all less safe,” he said.
The governor has been on a media blitz promoting his book, including an appearance on “The Late Show with Stephen Colbert” earlier this week.
He told the host it’s a “sad day in America that a governor of a commonwealth needs to prepare for a federal onslaught where they would send troops in to undermine the freedoms and constitutional rights of our citizens.”
In response to a request for comment, White House spokesperson Abigail Jackson said assaults on federal immigration agents are on the rise because of “untrue smears by elected Democrats.”
“Just the other day, an officer had his finger bitten off by a radical left-wing rioter. ICE officers act heroically to enforce the law and protect American communities and local officials should work with them, not against them. Anyone pointing the finger at law enforcement officers instead of the criminals is simply doing the bidding of criminal illegal aliens,” Jackson said in a written statement.
A voter casts a paper ballot in Virginia. Despite two recent legal setbacks, the Trump administration has sued the Virginia elections commissioner in its quest to obtain sensitive voter data. (Photo by Markus Schmidt/Virginia Mercury)
The Trump administration has sued another state — Virginia — in its quest to obtain sensitive voter data, despite two recent legal setbacks in suits against other states.
The Justice Department on Friday sued Susan Beals, the elections commissioner in Virginia, after months of seeking a copy of the state’s voter registration lists, including individual names, addresses, dates of birth and Social Security numbers.
“Virginia becomes the next state sued for ignoring federal law!” U.S. Assistant Attorney General Harmeet Dhillon wrote on the social media platform X.
The Trump administration has sued more than 20 states, according to the Brennan Center for Justice, in what the administration frames as a quest to ensure that states are properly maintaining voter rolls, that ineligible people are kept off rolls and that only citizens are voting.
The U.S. Department of Justice is sharing state voter roll information with the Department of Homeland Security in a search for noncitizens, the Trump administration confirmed in September.
While election officials stress that well-maintained voter rolls are important, President Donald Trump and some of his Republican allies have long promoted baseless claims of widespread voter fraud.
In the Virginia case, the Justice Department claims it was reassured by the administration of former Republican Gov. Glenn Youngkin that it would hand over voter rolls. But that did not occur and Youngkin was term-limited. On Saturday, Democrat Abigail Spanberger was sworn in as Virginia’s 75th governor.
Beals, the elections commissioner, was appointed by Youngkin in 2022. The state election department did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Last week, similar federal lawsuits hit roadblocks in California and Oregon.
U.S. District Court Judge David Carter dismissed a lawsuit by the Department of Justice against California seeking voter information, calling the request “unprecedented and illegal.” Just a day earlier, a separate federal judge said from the bench he planned to dismiss a similar lawsuit against Oregon.
Democratic secretaries of state have criticized the federal government’s data requests, calling them an unwarranted attempt by the Trump administration to exercise federal power over elections. Under the U.S. Constitution, states administer elections, though Congress can regulate them.
This story was originally produced by Stateline, which is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network which includes Wisconsin Examiner, and is supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity.
Ryan Patraw processes ballots at the Marion County Clerk’s Office in Salem, Ore., on May 16. Judges in Oregon and California have ruled against the Trump administration’s requests to turn over voter data. (Photo by Ron Cooper/Oregon Capital Chronicle)
The Trump administration hit two major legal roadblocks this week in its effort to obtain sensitive personal voter data from states.
On Thursday, U.S. District Court Judge David Carter dismissed a lawsuit by the Department of Justice against California seeking voter information. The Trump administration has demanded that at least 40 states provide unredacted voter data, which can include driver’s license and Social Security numbers. The department has sued 21 states and Washington, D.C., that have refused to provide the data.
Carter, an appointee of President Bill Clinton, called the government’s request “unprecedented and illegal” in a 33-page ruling.
Just a day earlier, U.S. District Court Judge Mustafa Kasubhai said he planned to dismiss a similar lawsuit against Oregon. Kasubhai, an appointee of President Joe Biden, said his final written decision may be different.
“The federal government tried to abuse their power to force me to break my oath of office and hand over your private data,” Oregon Secretary of State Tobias Read said in a statement about the tentative ruling, according to the Oregon Capital Chronicle. “I stood up to them and said no. Now, the court sided with us. Tonight, we proved, once again, we have the power to push back and win.”
The Justice Department has framed its demands as necessary to ensure states are properly maintaining their voter rolls. It says it needs the information to ensure ineligible people are kept off rolls and that only citizens are voting. The department is sharing state voter roll information with the Department of Homeland Security in a search for noncitizens, the Trump administration confirmed in September.
While election officials say well-maintained voter rolls are important, President Donald Trump and some of his Republican allies have long promoted baseless claims of widespread voter fraud.
Democratic election officials have criticized the data requests, calling them an unwarranted attempt by the Trump administration to exercise federal power over elections. Under the U.S. Constitution, states administer elections, though Congress can regulate them.
In arguing for the data, the federal government cited the National Voter Registration Act, the Help America Vote Act and Title III of the Civil Rights Act of 1960, all of which were intended to protect elections and the right to vote.
In California, Carter ruled that the federal government — and the court — are not authorized to use civil rights legislation “as a tool to forsake the privacy rights of millions of Americans.”
“There cannot be unbridled consolidation of all elections power in the Executive without action from Congress and public debate,” Carter wrote. “This is antithetical to the promise of fair and free elections our country promises and the franchise that civil rights leaders fought and died for.”
The Justice Department did not immediately say whether it planned to appeal the ruling.
This story was originally produced by Stateline, which is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network which includes Wisconsin Examiner, and is supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity.
A police officer uses the Flock Safety license plate reader system. Many left-leaning states and cities are trying to protect their residents’ personal information amid the Trump administration's immigration crackdown, but a growing number of conservative lawmakers also want to curb the use of surveillance technologies. (Photo courtesy of Flock Safety)
As part of its deportation efforts, the Trump administration has ordered states to hand over personal data from voter rolls, driver’s license records and programs such as Medicaid and food stamps.
At the same time, the administration is trying to consolidate the bits of personal data held across federal agencies, creating a single trove of information on people who live in the United States.
Many left-leaning states and cities are trying to protect their residents’ personal information amid the immigration crackdown. But a growing number of conservative lawmakers also want to curb the use of surveillance technologies, such as automated license plate readers, that can be used to identify and track people.
Conservative-led states such as Arkansas, Idaho and Montana enacted laws last year designed to protect the personal data collected through license plate readers and other means. They joined at least five left-leaning states — Illinois, Massachusetts, Minnesota, New York and Washington — that specifically blocked U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement from accessing their driver’s license records.
The Trump administration’s goal is to create a “surveillance dragnet across the country,” said William Owen, communications director at the Surveillance Technology Oversight Project, a nonprofit that advocates for stronger privacy laws.
We're entering an increasingly dystopian era of high-tech surveillance.
– William Owen, communications director at the Surveillance Technology Oversight Project
“We’re entering an increasingly dystopian era of high-tech surveillance,” Owen said. Intelligence sharing between various levels of government, he said, has “allowed ICE to sidestep sanctuary laws and co-opt local police databases and surveillance tools, including license plate readers, facial recognition and other technologies.”
A new Montana law bars government entities from accessing electronic communications and related material without a warrant. Republican state Sen. Daniel Emrich, the law’s author, said “the most important thing that our entire justice system is based on is the principle against unlawful search and seizure” — the right enshrined in the Fourth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution.
“It’s tough to find individuals who are constitutionally grounded and understand the necessity of keeping the Fourth Amendment rights intact at all times for all reasons — with minimal or zero exceptions,” Emrich said in an interview.
ICE did not respond to Stateline’s requests for comment.
Automated license plate readers
Recently, cities and states have grown particularly concerned over the use of automated license plate readers (ALPRs), which are high-speed camera and computer systems that capture license plate information on vehicles that drive by. These readers sit on top of police cars and streetlights or can be hidden within construction barrels and utility poles.
Some cameras collect data that gets stored in databases for years, raising concerns among privacy advocates. One report from the Brennan Center for Justice, a progressive think tank at New York University, found the data can be susceptible to hacking. Different agencies have varying policies on how long they keep the data, according to the International Association of Chiefs of Police, a law enforcement advocacy group.
Supporters of the technology, including many in law enforcement, say the technology is a powerful tool for tracking down criminal suspects.
Flock Safety says it has cameras in more than 5,000 communities and is connected to more than 4,800 law enforcement agencies across 49 states. The company claims its cameras conduct more than 20 billion license plate reads a month. It collects the data and gives it to police departments, which use the information to locate people.
Holly Beilin, a spokesperson for Flock Safety, told Stateline that while there are local police agencies that may be working with ICE, the company does not have a contractual relationship with the agency. Beilin also said that many liberal and even sanctuary cities continue to sign contracts with Flock Safety. She noted that the cameras have been used to solve some high-profile crimes, including identifying and leading police to the man who committed the Brown University shooting and killed an MIT professor at the end of last year.
“Agencies and cities are very much able to use this technology in a way that complies with their values. So they do not have to share data out of state,” Beilin said.
Pushback over data’s use
But critics, such as the American Civil Liberties Union, say that Flock Safety’s cameras are not only “giving even the smallest-town police chief access to an enormously powerful driver-surveillance tool,” but also that the data is being used by ICE. One news outlet, 404 Media, obtained records of these searches and found many were being carried out by local officers on behalf of ICE.
Last spring, the Denver City Council unanimously voted to terminate its contract with Flock Safety, but Democratic Mayor Mike Johnston unilaterally extended the contract in October, arguing that the technology was a useful crime-fighting tool.
The ACLU of Colorado has vehemently opposed the cameras, saying last August that audit logs from the Denver Police Department show more than 1,400 searches had been conducted for ICE since June 2024.
“The conversation has really gotten bigger because of the federal landscape and the focus, not only on immigrants and the functionality of ICE right now, but also on the side of really trying to reduce and or eliminate protections in regards to access to reproductive care and gender affirming care,” Anaya Robinson, public policy director at the ACLU of Colorado.
“When we erode rights and access for a particular community, it’s just a matter of time before that erosion starts to touch other communities.”
Jimmy Monto, a Democratic city councilor in Syracuse, New York, led the charge to eliminate Flock Safety’s contract in his city.
“Syracuse has a very large immigrant population, a very large new American population, refugees that have resettled and been resettled here. So it’s a very sensitive issue,” Monto said, adding that license plate readers allow anyone reviewing the data to determine someone’s immigration status without a warrant.
“When we sign a contract with someone who is collecting data on the citizens who live in a city, we have to be hyper-focused on exactly what they are doing while we’re also giving police departments the tools that they need to also solve homicides, right?” Monto said.
“Certainly, if license plate readers are helpful in that way, I think the scope is right. But we have to make sure that that’s what we’re using it for, and that the companies that we are contracting with are acting in good faith.”
Emrich, the Montana lawmaker, said everyone should be concerned about protecting constitutional privacy rights, regardless of their political views.
“If the government is obtaining data in violation of constitutional rights, they could be violating a whole slew of individuals’ constitutional rights in pursuit of the individuals who may or may not be protected under those same constitutional rights,” he said.
This story was originally produced by Stateline, which is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network which includes Wisconsin Examiner, and is supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity.
A Tennessee voter casts his ballot in Nashville during a special election this month. The U.S. Department of Justice has sent confidential draft agreements on voter data sharing to more than a dozen states, including Tennessee — part of the Trump administration’s effort to obtain unredacted voter rolls from states. (Photo by Jon Cherry/Getty Images)
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 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.
What the DOJ is trying to do is something that should frighten everybody across the political spectrum.
– David Becker, executive director of the Center for Election Innovation & Research
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.
A transcript of a Dec. 4 federal court hearing showing Eric Neff, acting chief of the Justice Department’s Voting Section, listing states that he says are willing to comply with a request for voter data based on a proposed memorandum of understanding (MOU). (Screenshot by Jonathan Shorman)
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.”
Editor’s note: This story has been updated to correct when Colorado refused to sign the memorandum and when the suit was brought against the state. Colorado Newsline’s Lindsey Toomer contributed reporting. Stateline reporter Jonathan Shorman can be reached at jshorman@stateline.org.
This story was originally produced by Stateline, which is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network which includes Wisconsin Examiner, and is supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity.
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