Minnesota's limit on the amount of help one person may give to others in casting their ballots violates federal law and the state's constitution, the latest Democratic voting rights lawsuit alleges.
The litigation was announced Thursday by the party's House and Senate campaign committees. They filed it last week against the state's top elections official, Secretary of State Steve Simon, a fellow Democrat.
The suit joins more than a dozen others already filed in the early stages of the 2020 campaign by the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee and the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee, part of an eight-figure attack on state laws they view as attempts to suppress turnout by black people and other minorities or to give Republicans some other political advantage.
Almost all the cases have been brought in places that are presidential tossups or have several hot congressional races In November.
While the Democratic nominee has carried Minnesota in every White House contest since 1976, President Trump came within 2 points (45,000 votes) of winning there last time and has vowed to contest it harder this fall.
The new suit is the second the Democrats have brought in the state. Last fall they sued in federal court challenging a Minnesota law that dictates the order of candidates on the ballot be the reverse of the results of the previous election. That means candidates of the Democratic-Farmer-Labor Party (as its uniquely known in the state) will be listed last this November, which the party argues puts it at a disadvantage.
The Minnesota law challenged by the newest suit states that a person may help no more than three voters complete in-person or absentee ballots. The intent of the law is to prevent efforts to manipulate the votes of elderly, disabled and non-English-speaking voters.
But the lawsuit says the statute directly violates the federal Voting Rights Act requiring that any voter needing assistance has the right to choose whomever they want as a helper. The Democrats also maintain the law presents a burden on the right to vote under the Minnesota Constitution.
Last year, Simon conceded at a state legislative hearing that the limit on helpers may not survive a legal challenge.
The suit argues the law places a particular burden on the large communities of Somalis and Hmong people from Southeast Asia who have settled in Minnesota.
"We should be working to increase access to the ballot, not restrict it," said Rep. Cheri Bustos of Illinois, the DCCC chairwoman.
Her group and its Senate counterpart, which recruit and help finance congressional candidates, have pledged to spend more than $10 million on their lawsuit strategy, which has so far been pressed in eight states: Arizona, Florida, Georgia, Michigan, Minnesota, North Carolina, South Carolina, and Texas. They have already scored a handful of wins, most recently when South Carolina officials agreed this week to drop a requirement that complete Social Security numbers be provided on voter registration forms.
image of U.S. President Donald Trump is displayed on a digital billboard in Times Square in New York on April 8, 2026.
Trump is stuck between two realities. Neither serves the American people
Normally, I worry that events may overtake a column. But not so with the Iran war.
I don’t worry about running afoul of a headline or Truth Social post from the president because what is said about the situation is no longer very relevant to the reality.
On April 8, Nick Catoggio, my Dispatch colleague, dubbed an earlier stoppage with Iran “Schrödinger’s ceasefire.” This was a reference to the famous thought experiment by the physicist Erwin Schrödinger, who was trying to explain the weirdness of “superpositionality” in quantum physics. A cat in a box is both dead and alive at the same time until you open the box. Schrödinger meant to illustrate the absurdity of the idea that particles aren’t any one thing, but a “cloud of probabilities.”
The Trump administration is stuck in a word cloud of probabilities of his own making. The war is over. The war is on. The war isn’t a war. We have a deal, but we don’t have a deal, but we’re about to have a deal. We destroyed Iran’s military. No, we left it intact. We want regime change. No we don’t. We already accomplished it. We “obliterated” Iran’s nuclear program a year ago. We had to go to war in February to prevent nuclear war. The Strait of Hormuz is open, closed, or something in-between. No deal without “unconditional surrender.” Let’s make a deal!
This everything-all-at-once vibe can be disorienting, particularly since most Americans didn’t have a war with Iran on their bingo cards until the shooting had already started. President Trump didn’t prepare the country or consult with Congress beforehand because he thought it would all be a smashing success in a matter of weeks.
The miscalculation that started it all: killing Iran’s Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, and much of Iran’s senior leadership, on the first day of the war. To “the great proud people of Iran, I say tonight that the hour of your freedom is at hand,” Trump announced on Feb. 28. “When we are finished, take over your government. It will be yours to take. This will be probably your only chance for generations.”
I support regime change in Iran and shed no tears for Khamenei or his goons. But when you start a war by killing the regime’s top leaders, it’s not unreasonable for the remaining ones to conclude that you really intend regime change.
Khamenei was a murderous fanatic, but he was a fairly cautious one. He liked to threaten closing the Strait of Hormuz or attacking our regional allies, but he was reluctant to actually do it, fearing it would invite a regime change war. The mullahs and IRGC goons believed, not unreasonably, that if they lost their grip on power, they’d be lynched by the Iranian people they’ve brutalized for decades.
By starting with a regime change war, Trump removed any reason for the regime not to go for broke. When you have nothing to lose — particularly when you are a millenarian religious fanatic — a Persian Alamo strategy makes a lot of sense.
So Iran closed the Strait of Hormuz and attacked its neighbors.
But it turns out this wasn’t the Alamo. In the contest of wills, Trump blinked. The Iranian regime’s tolerance for punishment proved — so far — to be greater than Trump’s and that of our gulf allies. Militarily we could finish the job, but that would require ground troops and much greater economic turmoil. In a conflict Trump launched unilaterally without the prior support of Congress, NATO or the American people, Trump doesn’t have the political capital for that.
But that’s only half the problem. Trump wants the war over, but he doesn’t want to pay — militarily, economically, politically — what that would cost. So he wants to make a deal that ends it. But there is no deal available that wouldn’t come at an equally undesirable cost. Any deal that looks like what President Obama struck with the Iranians would be too embarrassing to bear. But the Iranians are convinced that they can get just such a deal, and they’re willing to drag things out as long as it takes.
The result: Trump’s in a box of his own making. He thinks he can talk his way out by simply asserting a reality that doesn’t exist. When the financial markets get nervous, he announces a breakthrough that is, at best, a possibility. When the Iranians agree to a deal that looks similar to one Obama might negotiate, Trump goes back to his threats.
It can’t go on forever. But I’m sure it’ll last until long after this column is forgotten.
Jonah Goldberg is editor-in-chief of The Dispatch and the host of The Remnant podcast. His Twitter handle is @JonahDispatch.