MONTPELIER, Vt. — Vermont Attorney General Charity Clark and 24 other states and territories filed a friend-of-the-court brief Friday in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, opposing the Trump administration's attempt to attach election-related conditions to federal counterterrorism funding, Clark's office said.

The brief supports a group of local governments challenging decisions by the Federal Emergency Management Agency and the U.S. Department of Homeland Security to impose the conditions on Homeland Security Grant Program money. The attorneys general describe the conditions as unlawful and say the administration is trying to coerce states and localities into advancing its election priorities.

According to Clark's office, the conditions would require state election officials to use the department's Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements database, which the office called faulty, to verify the citizenship of every registered voter. They would also force state and local election authorities to discard hundreds of millions of dollars in voting equipment and switch to paper-ballot systems, the office said.

A lower court found the conditions unlawful and ordered the administration not to impose them. The administration is seeking a stay of that order while it appeals, and the states are asking the appeals court to deny it.

In July, a coalition of attorneys general that included Clark filed a separate lawsuit over the conditions. Clark's office said that suit followed a successful defense of the same category of funding against conditions in 2025.

California Attorney General Rob Bonta and Illinois Attorney General Kwame Raoul led the coalition. Attorneys general from Connecticut, Maine, Massachusetts and Rhode Island also joined, along with those of 17 other states and the District of Columbia and the governor of Kentucky.

This brief was drafted by AI from a public agency or political press release and published by The New England Signal. Why we use AI for stories like this one.