We achieved a major milestone in the fight for free and fair elections this week. You wouldn't know it from reading the legacy media, but it may prove as important as anything else in preventing Donald Trump from subverting the midterm elections.

Federal law prohibits states from conducting systematic voter removals during the 90 days prior to an election. The purpose of the law is simple: the closer we get to Election Day, the harder it is for voters to correct mistakes or challenge efforts to kick them off the rolls in time to cast their ballots.

We crossed that 90-day line last Wednesday. As a result, states can no longer conduct voter purges or other mass removals.

In normal election years, this goes largely unnoticed by the public. States typically time their routine list maintenance to fall outside that period. Occasionally, a state violates the prohibition, and litigation follows.

But this year, this cutoff — or "quiet period," as it's known — is central to protecting our elections. That's because Donald Trump has been pulling every possible lever of government to try to build a national voter file, with hopes of then dictating to the states who they must remove before the fall.

Trump's DOJ has sued 30 states to gain access to their unredacted voter files. So far, DOJ has lost 21 of those cases and won zero. Nine remain pending — in Delaware, Washington, Georgia, Hawaii, Nevada, Utah, Minnesota, Idaho and Vermont. My law firm has intervened in these cases to protect voters' data — and we are undefeated.

Trump has also issued executive orders aimed at wresting control of elections from the states. One of those orders seeks to use the U.S. Postal Service as leverage: it directs USPS to withhold or condition its delivery of mail-in ballots for states that refuse to turn over their voter lists. That effort has also been blocked.

The Trump administration is currently appealing its losses in all of these cases — including, in the case of the executive order, to the U.S. Supreme Court. But this is where the 90-day trigger for the quiet period comes in.

Because states can no longer systematically remove voters from the rolls in time for the midterms, many of Trump's plans to weaponize voter data can no longer be implemented for 2026.

For example, if the DOJ were to tell a state to remove 100,000 voters, the state could no longer comply — even if it wanted to. And the DOJ is powerless to remove the names itself.

This doesn't mean the risks to the midterms are over.

One of Donald Trump's great talents is his unwillingness to give up. When one door closes, he finds another lock to pick. Republicans are already trying to weaken the 90-day quiet period, arguing it doesn't apply at all.

In Georgia, for instance, the DOJ is arguing that the quiet period doesn't stop removals if the federal government — not the state — conducts the systematic review, and then hands the state a list of flagged voters to remove one by one. The DOJ claims that final step counts as "individualized," even though the review that produced the list was systematic.

It's a narrow-sounding argument, but if courts accept it, it would let states use Trump's data to purge voters right up until Election Day, so long as they do so one name at a time rather than all at once.

The Republican Party is going a step further still. It has asked the Supreme Court to declare that states may systematically cancel the registrations of alleged noncitizens during the quiet period — no individualized process required. The justices will hear oral arguments this fall.

Purging voters, of course, is not the only way Trump will attack the elections. Deploying federal agents to the polls, seizing ballots, and telling his supporters to block certification remain obvious threats. So too do the myriad lower-profile voter suppression techniques that can still decide the outcome of close elections.

And the quiet period doesn't protect voters from Trump's misuse of collected voter data for other purposes — such as targeting his political opponents with baseless investigations and prosecutions. It doesn't prevent the data from being used to threaten election officials and voters. And, of course, that data can still be used to spread disinformation and lies about voting and results.

All these threats are real and must be taken seriously. We need comprehensive litigation, communication, and organizing plans to combat the lies Trump will tell — and that too many in the media will uncritically repeat.

Still, we can take a moment to celebrate the good news. The job isn't done, and the fight ahead may be long, but for now, democracy is on the docket — and it's winning.

Tomorrow, we will wake up and continue the fight for free and fair elections this November.