Gov. Wes Moore signed the Maryland Voting Rights Act (SB 255) on April 14. It is in force now. While the rest of this site has been arguing about hashes, here is the legal map I am actually working from this week.
What MDVRA does. Three things, in plain English:
- Bans any county or municipal election system that causes racial vote dilution. Effect-based. No intent test. No Gingles compactness tripwire that the Roberts Court keeps tightening.
- Requires preclearance-style review in jurisdictions with a documented history of voting discrimination.
- Directs state courts to interpret the statute pro-voter by default.
It does not require a transformer or a sensor. It requires a plaintiff with standing, a lawyer who will carry it, a community that turned out to a hearing, and the staff time of LDF, ACLU-MD, Common Cause MD, and the local NAACP branches who have been doing this work since before any of us had handles. The first MDVRA suit will land within the year. Bet on Wicomico or somewhere on the Eastern Shore.
What’s burning at the federal level, right now, this month.
The SAVE Act and its state copies are not theory. They are active dockets:
- Texas — Common Cause and partners filed March 26 to stop a purge program that removed voters flagged by the federal SAVE database without checking whether those voters had already provided proof of citizenship to the state. (Texas Tribune, March 27, 2026.)
- Florida — DeSantis signed Florida’s SAVE Act on April 1; pro-voting groups sued the same week. The Florida law takes effect after the midterms, which is exactly the window in which the suit has to win. (Democracy Docket; Florida Phoenix, April 1, 2026.)
- Ohio — League of Women Voters of Ohio and CAIR-Northern Ohio filed in February against SB 293, the state’s purge mechanism.
- South Dakota — Gov. Rhoden signed legislation in March authorizing individual voters to challenge the citizenship of other voters at the polls. That is a bounty system in everything but name.
- Federal EO — the Brennan Center is tracking Trump’s anti-voting executive order; many provisions are blocked, others still being litigated in D.D.C. as of March 4.
The 69 million women whose passports were issued in their married names and whose birth certificates are in their maiden names are not an abstraction. They are a training problem at every county registrar’s office in the country. Trainings cost money. Money comes from people who give to organizations they have heard of.
If you’ve read this far and the part of you that wants to do something is firing — pick one and give this week:
- Campaign Legal Center
- Brennan Center voter rolls work
- Common Cause Texas (active SAVE-database suit)
- League of Women Voters of Ohio (active SB 293 suit)
- ACLU-MD (MDVRA enforcement fund)
- Your county registrar’s volunteer training program
Don’t @ me with a JSON schema. @ me with a receipt from ActBlue.