“Last May, Montana Republicans enacted their latest attack on Election Day voter registration. The new law limited the popular practice to five hours — from the time polls open to noon. Voters who showed up in the afternoon could no longer register and vote the same day.

Republicans were counting on it being the type of change that rarely makes headlines. But they knew that its impact on thousands of Montana voters would have been profound.

Within days of its enactment, my law firm filed a lawsuit to block this voter suppression law. Earlier this week, a state court judge blocked the new law from going into effect while the case proceeds in court.

It was a significant win. Almost no one outside of Montana noticed.

That is not an accident.

The passage of SB 490, the lawsuit that followed, and the court’s decision received virtually no coverage from national media outlets. It does not involve the Supreme Court. Donald Trump is not a party. Montana is not a presidential battleground state. In the calculus of the legacy media, that adds up to a story not worth telling.

That lack of coverage has real consequences. When voter suppression is ignored, it metastasizes into disenfranchisement and ultimately election subversion. This is one of the reasons I founded Democracy Docket in 2020.

The law in question — SB 490 — was just the latest effort by Montana Republicans to abolish or limit Election Day voter registration.

In 2014, Republicans referred a ballot measure to voters that would have eliminated the practice entirely. Voters soundly rejected it by 14 points.

Undeterred, the Republican-controlled legislature tried again in 2021. After it enacted a new law restricting the practice, my law firm sued and won. The state Supreme Court found that the new law “impermissibly interfered” with the state constitution’s right to vote.

Rather than accept defeat, in 2025, Republicans came back with SB 490.

Republicans have offered a variety of pretextual reasons for their hostility to Election Day registration — concerns about administrative burden, fears of fraud, appeals to election integrity. Time and time again, courts have rejected them. That is because the real reason has nothing to do with election administration. It is purely an effort to obtain partisan advantage.

The data shows that Native Americans and young voters are among the populations that most rely on Election Day registration. They also tend to vote Democratic. And when broken down by time of day, these two groups tend to vote later in the day than other voters — precisely the hours SB 490 sought to eliminate.

Laws like SB 490 — and many others around the country just like it — are essential components of the Republican Party’s broader voter suppression strategy. Collectively, they are every bit as important as the high-profile voting rights and redistricting cases dominating the news today.

Yet carving out the time and resources to detect and litigate these individual state laws is not easy. When Donald Trump signs a new anti-voting executive order, it garners immediate publicity and no shortage of organizations and lawyers eager to challenge it.

State-level voter suppression laws operate differently. They move quietly through legislatures, often with little public debate. Simply identifying changes to state voting laws and rules is time-consuming and difficult. Each state has its own set of laws, rules and administrative procedures. In some states, county-level policies can further alter the practical effect of a law on the ground.

Litigating these cases also poses unique challenges. Affected voters may be reluctant to speak out — let alone file a lawsuit. Experienced voting rights lawyers are often in short supply. And in many red states, the political environment has made the work harder still.

Prior to Trump’s reelection, large national law firms frequently took these cases on a pro bono basis. Today, faced with political and financial pressure from the administration, fewer are willing to sue Republican-controlled states over their voting laws. The need, however, has only grown greater.

That is why I remain so committed to this work. My firm is currently litigating over 80 voting and election cases in 43 states plus the District of Columbia. Some involve high-profile disputes that draw national attention. Many are exactly like the case we just won in Montana — too often overlooked but essential.

Democracy does not only live in the Supreme Court or in presidential battleground states. We cannot be a functioning democracy if we ignore all but a handful of states. And Democrats will not regain their footing in states like Montana if the voting rules become rigged against them and their supporters.

The effort to dismantle voting rights is a national problem that demands national attention. It is waged everywhere simultaneously. So must the effort to defend them.

State by state, community by community, voter by voter — that is how voting rights are protected. And that is how they can be lost, if no one is paying attention.