Some elections professionals say federal law enforcement still isn’t doing enough to deter bad actors and ensure that those on the front lines of democracy are protected this fall. (Photo by John Moore/Getty Images)

Aiming to send a message, the Biden administration recently spotlighted its indictments and convictions in cases involving threats to election officials or workers.

But with no letup in reports of attacks, some elections professionals say federal law enforcement still isn’t doing enough to deter bad actors and ensure that those on the front lines of democracy are protected this fall.

“Election officials by and large have no confidence that if something were to happen to them, there would be any consequences,” said Amy Cohen, the executive director of the National Association of State Election Directors. “It is very clear that we are not seeing a deterrent effect.”

A U.S. Justice Department spokesman declined to comment for this story, instead directing States Newsroom to a webpage for the department’s Election Threats Task Force.

Launched by the Justice Department in 2021 in response to the wave of harassment of election officials that followed the 2020 election, the Election Threats Task Force works closely with local law enforcement and U.S. attorney’s offices around the country to investigate threats.

In going after those who make threats against election workers, the Justice Department is honoring a foundational purpose: The department was created in 1870 in part to protect the voting rights of southern Blacks during Reconstruction.

Run by John Keller, a top official in the Justice Department’s Public Integrity Section, the task force also includes the Criminal Division’s Computer Crime and Intellectual Property Section, the Civil Rights Division, the National Security Division, and the FBI. It also works with several other government agencies, including the U.S. Postal Inspection Service and the Department of Homeland Security.

Since its launch, the task force has brought charges in 17 cases, according to the department’s tally. Eight cases have resulted in prison time, with sentencing scheduled in several more.

In one case, brought in Nevada, the defendant was acquitted.

In March, a Massachusetts man received a three-and-a-half-year sentence — the longest won by the task force to date — for sending an online message to an Arizona election official warning her a bomb would be detonated “in her personal space” unless she resigned.

A Texas man received the same sentence last August for posting threatening messages targeting two Maricopa County, Arizona officials and their families, and separately calling for a “mass shooting of poll workers” in precincts with “suspect results.”

‘Each of these cases should serve as a warning’

Attorney General Merrick Garland highlighted these convictions and others in a May 13 speech at a task force meeting.

“Each of these cases should serve as a warning,” declared Garland. “If you threaten to harm or kill an election worker, volunteer, or official, the Justice Department will find you. And we will hold you accountable.”

But those prosecutions amount to only a tiny share of what the Justice Department has said is over 2,000 reports of threats or harassment submitted by the election community to the FBI since the task force was launched in 2021. Around 100 of those were investigated, according to the Justice Department.

The small number of investigations and prosecutions is largely due to free speech concerns. Legal experts say that anything short of a direct and explicit threat to cause physical harm may well be protected speech under the First Amendment.

“A true threat is a serious expression of an intent to commit an act of unlawful violence,” Keller has said. “If they don’t cross that line into invoking violence, they are generally not going to constitute a criminally prosecutable threat.”

Still, as the 2024 vote approaches, there’s little evidence that the volume of attacks against the people who run elections has declined, or that election workers feel safer.

A recent Brennan Center survey found that more than half of local election officials said they were concerned about the safety of their colleagues or staff — around the same number as in 2022, the year of the last federal election. Around a quarter worry about being assaulted at home or at work.

“This is a widespread issue in the elections community,” said Tammy Patrick, the CEO for programs for the National Association of Election Officials, and a former election official in Maricopa County. “It’s happening all across the country. It’s not just a question of it being in swing states, or just being in the city or whatever. It’s happening in a way that is a concerted campaign to create and sow chaos.”

“There is some feeling that the task force is a political tool,” said another election expert, “that allows the administration to say they care and they’re doing something.”

Troubling episodes but little followup

In March 2022, anti-fraud activists, accompanied by the local GOP chair, showed up at the office of Michella Huff, the election director for Surry County, North Carolina.

Huff said the activists tried to pressure her to give them access to county voting machines, citing what they said were flawed voter rolls. The group repeatedly threatened to have Huff ousted from her job if she didn’t cooperate, and said they planned to return with the local sheriff, though they did not do so.

Huff declined to provide access to the machines, and reported the episode to the state election board’s investigations unit.

A spokesperson for the board did not respond to an inquiry about whether the report was forwarded to federal law enforcement.

Election security advocates have urged the FBI to do more to probe efforts by supporters of former President Donald Trump to gain access to voting machines in other states, warning that the breaches could have allowed for voting machine software to be compromised.

Huff said she never heard from law enforcement on any level, despite speaking publicly about the episode.

Though Huff wasn’t physically threatened, she said she’d still like to have seen federal authorities do more to respond.

“If it is truly a threat, I think every threat needs to be looked at serious(ly), and it needs to be considered as to what the intent was, if it was successful, and what the repercussions would be if it had been successful,” said Huff. “A threat is a threat.”

More overt efforts to physically intimidate election workers also have at times spurred little law enforcement followup.

The night before South Carolina’s 2022 primaries, a Republican candidate who has promoted lies about the 2020 election posted a message on the conservative social media site Telegram, to a group of anti-fraud activists.

“For all of you on the team tomorrow observing the polls, Good Hunting,” the message said. “We have the enemy on their back foot, press the attack. Forward.”

During the voting period, groups of activists showed up at multiple polling places to verbally harass, photograph, and film election workers as they did their jobs, recounted Isaac Cramer, the executive director of the Charleston County Board of Voter Registration and Elections.

The activists called the police to at least one polling site, falsely alleging evidence of fraud by election staff. The police came, but made no arrests — though the episode left the site’s lead poll manager shaken, Cramer said.

Cramer said his office provided detailed reports on both the Telegram message and the harassment at polling sites to the Department of Homeland Security, as well as to the state election commission.

“We took that threat pretty seriously,” he said, referring to the Telegram message.

He said he received a response from DHS saying the report was being looked into, but heard nothing after that.

“I don’t know what the conclusions were, or what occurred after submitting that information,” Cramer said.

But Cramer added that the experience produced a successful effort to increase collaboration with local, state, and federal authorities — with the result that the county is much better prepared to respond to, and anticipate, similar incidents this year.

“When you’re on the defense, you’re kind of reacting to everything, and I think that’s how the past was,” said Cramer.? “And now we’re being proactive.”

‘I dread November for you guys’

Patrick, of the National Association of Election Officials, said that while she understands the need to avoid running afoul of the First Amendment, authorities must balance legitimate free speech concerns with their urgent duty to protect those conducting elections.

And, she suggested, they may not always be getting that balance right.

“We need to be really careful that we’re not allowing people to yell fire in a crowded theater,” Patrick said.? “And that we’re not allowing people to use what they are potentially claiming as their freedom of speech as a way of creating chaos in a system, or to threaten individuals who are just trying to do their job.”

In addition, election professionals say they’ve complained for years that after they submit reports about threats and harassment to the FBI, there’s often a lack of follow-up beyond an acknowledgment of receipt.

Of course, law enforcement frequently can’t share details about their work, even with those who were targeted, in order not to compromise an investigation. But Patrick said even basic information could be helpful.

“Even letting them know that the report is being worked, so it doesn’t just go into the void, and a victim knows there’s going to be a knock-and-talk, gives the individual who made that report some sense of closure,” Patrick said, referring to when federal agents show up to speak with a suspect at their home.

The problem may be exacerbated by a lack of understanding among some in the elections world about what federal law enforcement can and can’t do. Many election officials, said Cohen, of the National Association of State Election Directors, want front-end help with steps like bolstering physical security to better prepare for incidents.

“Law enforcement, and especially federal law enforcement, is only coming at the back end,” said Cohen. “Their goal is not prevention or recovery, their goal is prosecution. And it has taken our community, I think, a long time to understand what we should be expecting from DoJ.”

Ultimately, said Cohen, the prosecutions brought by the Justice Department appear to have done little to reduce the number of threats election workers are subject to today.

“I’m really grateful that DOJ has secured convictions in Arizona,” said Cohen. “But I don’t think securing convictions in Arizona three years later has actually deterred anything in Arizona.”

Indeed, Arizona has been a hotbed for election misinformation, and its election officials continue to be targeted by a consistent stream of threats, according to multiple reports.

Huff, the county election director in North Carolina, said that with a major election approaching, members of the public often express sympathy for her and her staff — an acknowledgement that the vitriol they’ve been facing is only likely to get stronger.

“Out in public, I get that,” Huff said — ‘Boy, I dread November for you guys.’”

This story has been updated to reflect the correct name of the executive director of the Charleston County Board of Voter Registration and Elections.

Over the last year or more, several states?have passed legislation restricting the use of AI in political ads or requiring that it be disclosed. (Photo via Getty Images)

Members of the U.S. Senate are sounding the alarm about the threat that artificial intelligence poses to elections through its ability to deceive voters. But the prospects for legislation that can meaningfully address the problem appear uncertain.

In a Wednesday hearing, the Senate Rules Committee advanced three bills designed to counter the AI threat. But the only one to receive support from Republicans on the panel would simply create voluntary guidelines for election officials. It stops well short of restricting the use of AI in elections or even requiring disclosure of its use — steps that a growing number of states have already taken.

Sen. Amy Klobuchar, D-Minn., who chairs the Rules Committee and introduced all three measures, said the ability of generative AI to create deceptive images fundamentally threatens fair elections.

“We are going to see this resurgence of fakery and scams going on in our elections,” said Klobuchar. “And whether you’re a Democrat or a Republican, whether you’re a conservative or a liberal, we cannot have our democracy undermined by ads and videos where you literally don’t know if it’s the candidate you love or the candidate you dislike.”

Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer framed the stakes as even higher.

“Our democracy may never recover if we lose the ability to distinguish at all between what’s true and what’s false, as AI threatens to do,” said the New York Democrat, whose appearance at the hearing was a potential signal that he aims to prioritize the legislation.

AI robocalls, images

The dangers posed by AI were starkly illustrated in February, when thousands of New Hampshire voters received a robocall with an AI-generated voice impersonating President Joe Biden, urging them not to vote in the upcoming state primary. A Democratic operative working for a rival candidate has admitted to commissioning the calls.

And last June, the presidential campaign of Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis released a video that appeared to use AI-generated images of former President Donald Trump hugging Dr. Anthony Fauci, the former chief medical adviser to Biden who is deeply unpopular among GOP primary voters.

Klobuchar added at the hearing that she wanted to keep the issue out of the “partisan milieu.” Blue, purple and red states have lately passed laws to address the AI threat, she noted. And all three pieces of legislation Klobuchar has introduced have Republican co-sponsors.

Still, there were signs that avoiding partisan politics could prove impossible.

Republicans in Congress, often led by House Speaker Mike Johnson of Louisiana, have strongly opposed previous efforts by the Biden administration to restrict the spread of political disinformation, saying they violate speech rights and give too much power to government regulators.

Sen. Deb Fischer, R-Neb., the ranking Republican on the panel, raised similar concerns Wednesday about two of the Klobuchar bills: the Protect Elections from Deceptive AI Act, and the AI Transparency in Elections Act.

The Protect Elections from Deceptive AI Act would bar deceptive AI video or audio relating to candidates for federal office. It was introduced in September by Klobuchar and has five co-sponsors, including Sen. Josh Hawley, R-Mo.

The AI Transparency in Elections Act requires that political ads that use AI contain a statement disclosing its use. That measure, introduced by Klobuchar in March, is co-sponsored by Sen. Susan Collins, R-Maine.

The two bills, Fischer argued, “increase burdens on speech,” and are too vague in defining AI, creating uncertainty about whether a speaker might be subject to penalties. They also aim to federalize the issue and pre-empt state law, encroaching on state control of elections, Fischer added.

Both measures were passed out of the Rules Committee Wednesday on party-line votes, with no Republican support. (The official vote count in both cases was 9-2, because some Republicans who didn’t attend the hearing voted ’no by proxy,’ which isn’t counted as an official vote.)

The third measure, the Preparing Election Administrators for AI Act, was passed out of committee unanimously.

It would require the U.S. Election Assistance Commission to consult with the National Institute of Standards and Technology in creating voluntary guidelines for election officials for how to protect against the threat of AI in elections, especially with respect to its use by foreign adversaries.

On May 13, Reps. Brian Fitzpatrick, R-Penn., and Chrissy Houlahan, D-Penn., introduced companion legislation in the House.

Over the last year or more, states including Texas, Florida, New York, Michigan, Indiana, Wisconsin, Oregon, Utah, New Mexico and Idaho all have passed legislation restricting the use of AI in political ads or requiring that it be disclosed.

A ballot drop box in Madison, Wisconsin, that has been put out of commission. Since 2020, drop boxes have become a target for many on the right, who argue that they were insecure and could allow for fraud — though very few examples have been found in Wisconsin or elsewhere. (Wisconsin Examiner photo)

In Wisconsin, voters don’t yet know whether the ballot drop boxes that were in use in the state for years will be allowed this fall.

Georgians are waiting to find out whether much of their state’s sweeping 2021 voting law, which imposed a range of restrictions, will be in place.

In North Carolina, procedures for same-day voter registration and voter ID are still being fought over. And the rules to be used by election administrators to run Arizona’s vote also are up in the air.

With less than 120 days until some states mail out general election ballots, important voting regulations in nearly every major 2024 battleground remain the subject of legal battles. That means court decisions yet to come could go a long way toward determining the level of Americans’ ballot access.

They could also help determine the next president. A New York Times/Siena poll released May 13 found President Joe Biden leading or trailing narrowly in the key states of Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania, which together would likely be enough for him to win reelection, while former President Donald Trump leads more comfortably in Nevada, Arizona, and Georgia. The leading polling averages also show a very tight race.

Many of these high-stakes legal cases stem from lawsuits filed by Republicans or their allies, looking to impose tighter rules on the voting process to guard against fraud, which is extremely rare. Almost all the rest come from claims brought by Democrats or their allies, or by voting advocates, aiming to loosen the rules and expand access.

In a recent statement, Democrats called the GOP lawsuits “meritless,” and “designed only to try to undermine our democracy and voters’ confidence in it.” But federal courts have increasingly given respectful hearings to politically charged claims that many experts have called frivolous — meaning there can be few guarantees about how these cases will fare.

The uncertainty that comes with unresolved litigation could risk voter confusion in the fall, especially if there are late rule changes, some experts warn. But voting advocates say court rulings that favor voters are welcome, even if they come late in the game.

“I don’t think any voter is going to be confused or unhappy if the change in the rules favors their ballot being counted when it otherwise would have been rejected,” said Jon Sherman, the litigation director at the Fair Elections Center, a voter advocacy group.

The pileup of crucial cases in pivotal states is similar to other recent cycles. That means voting advocates on the ground have some practice at ensuring that voters get the most up-to-date information, said Hannah Fried, the founder and executive director of All Voting Is Local. The organization works with grassroots partners to protect and expand voter access.

“But it does get harder later on in the cycle,” Fried added. “And there’s a lot of litigation.”

Perhaps most striking, it means that, as an election with historically high stakes approaches, just how easy it will be for millions of Americans in pivotal states to cast a ballot and have it counted remains an unanswered question.

Here are some swing states and their biggest legal disputes:

Wisconsin

In the Badger State, which polls suggest could be closer than any other in this year’s presidential race, two key voting issues are still unresolved in the courts.

On May 13, the state’s Supreme Court began hearing a case in which progressive groups, now joined by the state’s Democratic attorney general, are challenging a 2021 decision that banned the ballot drop boxes that many voters had used for years to return mail ballots. At the time of that ruling, there were 570 drop boxes operating in the state, the Wisconsin Examiner has reported.

During and after the 2020 election, drop boxes became a target for many on the right, who argued that they were insecure and could allow for fraud — though very few examples have been found in Wisconsin or elsewhere.

Since 2021, the state Supreme Court’s majority has shifted from conservative to liberal, raising hopes among Democrats that the ban could be overturned.

A second ongoing case could turn out to be even more consequential, because it affects not just how easy or hard it is to cast a ballot, but whether certain votes will be counted at all.

Unlike in almost all other states, mail ballots in Wisconsin must be signed by a witness who can verify the voter’s identity, and the witness must provide their full address. In 2016, the state issued guidance that if a witness had left off a part of their address, like the ZIP code or town, local election administrators could fill it in if they could reasonably ascertain it. That allowed those ballots to be counted.

But in 2022, a Republican lawsuit led a state court to block that guidance, meaning those ballots — which could number in the thousands this fall, advocates estimate — are now at risk of being rejected.

A lawsuit brought by the League of Women Voters charges that rejecting ballots based on immaterial factors like a missing ZIP code violates federal civil rights law.

“It makes no sense to reject the ballot when you can locate and identify the witness,” said Sherman, of the Fair Elections Center, which is representing the plaintiffs in the case. “You’re just rejecting it based on a technicality.”

A district court ruled for the LWV, and the case is currently on appeal.

Georgia?

The Peachtree State’s sweeping 2021 voting law imposed tighter rules on various aspects of the voting process, and made Georgia the poster child for a wave of concern about voter suppression after the 2020 election. Two important lawsuits spurred by the measure, both of which could have big implications for the mail ballot process, remain ongoing.

One, brought by voting and civil rights groups and consolidated from a group of similar suits, challenges several of the law’s planks, many relating to mail ballots.

Among them: rules limiting where ballot drop boxes can be placed and when they can be made available to voters; restrictions on who can help a voter return a mail ballot; and a requirement that mail ballots be rejected if the voter birthdate on the outer envelope doesn’t match with the voter’s registration record.

The suit also challenges the law’s assessment of criminal penalties on people who give food and water to voters waiting in line — a provision that has made the jump to popular culture among critics of the GOP’s strict voting polices.

A federal court has temporarily blocked some challenged provisions, and declined to block others. In February, the U.S. Justice Department asked to intervene on the side of the plaintiffs. The litigation is ongoing.

A separate lawsuit filed by civic engagement groups challenges provisions of the law that restrict their ability to help people apply for a mail ballot. The measure fines outside groups $100 for every ballot application they send to a voter who has already requested or received an application, and adds other rules to the process.

“(I)n some cases (the challenged provisions) are impossible to comply with or would present such prohibitively expensive financial burdens that some groups, like Plaintiffs…may have no choice but to cease their operations in Georgia altogether,” the groups bringing the lawsuit, who helped hundreds of thousands of Georgians to register in 2020 and 2021, allege in the complaint.

The Republican National Committee and other national and state GOP groups have joined Georgia in defending the challenged provisions. A trial took place in federal court last month, and a ruling is awaited.

Arizona

The Grand Canyon State was the closest in the nation in 2020. Now, Republicans and their allies have filed lawsuits against Democratic election officials there, mostly seeking stricter voting policies.

The Republican National Committee and state GOP are challenging the Election Procedures Manual, a list of rules for running elections released last year, as required by law, by Secretary of State Adrian Fontes.

Republicans allege that the manual makes it too hard to remove voters from the rolls if they’re found to have said they’re a noncitizen when answering a questionnaire for jury duty; wrongly allows voters who haven’t shown proof of citizenship to vote in the presidential election and to vote by mail; doesn’t require election officials to do enough to find noncitizens on the rolls; and wrongly limits the public’s ability to view a voter’s signature to verify their mail ballot. The litigation is ongoing.

Another lawsuit, this one brought by a conservative legal group founded by the former Trump White House adviser Stephen Miller, challenges election rules adopted by Arizona’s largest county, Maricopa, as well as two other counties. One of its claims is that Maricopa’s placement of voting sites favors Black and Hispanic voters and discriminates against white and Native voters. It also charges that all three counties make it too easy for a voter to “cure” their mail ballot in cases when the signature on the ballot doesn’t match that in voter registration records.

A state appeals court paused the case on May 1. America First Legal did not respond to a message asking about their plans for responding.

North Carolina

Two important voting rules in the Tarheel State are still being hashed out in the courts.

A trial began May 6 in a challenge brought by the state NAACP to North Carolina’s voter ID law, which was passed in 2018. The lawsuit claims that the measure, which requires voters to present one of 10 forms of ID, discriminates against Black and Hispanic voters, who are more likely to lack ID.

An earlier restrictive voting law passed by North Carolina Republicans, that included a strict photo ID requirement, was struck down in 2016 by a federal judge, who ruled that it targeted Black voters with “surgical precision.”

Another lawsuit, this one filed by the progressive group Democracy NC, targets a different voting restriction — a provision of a state law passed last year that makes it easier for election officials to reject votes cast by voters who used same-day voter registration, if mail sent to their address is returned as undeliverable.

It isn’t yet clear whether the suit will be heard before the election. A federal judge last month declined a Republican request to put it on hold.

Michigan

The Great Lakes State has flipped back and forth in recent presidential elections and may again be pivotal this year. Several election cases are underway there, which could affect voters.

The RNC and state GOP are suing Democratic Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson over guidance from her office instructing local election officials to give a “presumption of validity” to the signatures that people voting by mail must provide when applying for a mail ballot, and must also write on the ballot return envelope. The guidance violates the state Constitution and state law, Republicans allege.

Benson’s office has sought to have the case thrown out, claiming the plaintiffs “have not identified a single signature that they contend local clerks have been required to accept … that otherwise would not have been accepted.”

It isn’t known how many votes might be at stake, but in 2022, nearly 1.9 million Michiganders voted by mail — around 42% of all voters.

Two other lawsuits, one filed by the RNC and another by a conservative legal group, the Public Interest Legal Foundation, accuse Benson of inadequate voter roll maintenance and aim to require her office to do more to remove names from the rolls. Fifty-three of the state’s 83 counties have more registered voters than eligible voters, the RNC claims.

A federal judge dismissed the suit filed by PILF, which has brought numerous similar lawsuits in other suits, mostly unsuccessfully. That ruling is currently being appealed. Benson’s office has asked a judge to dismiss the RNC suit.

Finally, Michigan GOP lawmakers are challenging reforms approved by voters via ballot measures in 2018 and 2022, which allowed early voting and no-excuse vote-by-mail, among other steps. Republicans claim the measures improperly bypassed the state legislature, which has exclusive authority to set voting rules — a version of the “Independent State Legislature Theory” that the U.S. Supreme Court rejected last year.

A federal judge last month threw out the lawsuit, but Republicans filed an appeal May 3. Though experts see the challenge as a long shot, any unexpected ruling favorable to the plaintiffs could throw the state’s election into turmoil, given the popularity of early and mail voting.

Pennsylvania

Republicans in the Keystone State are also relying on the Independent State Legislature Theory in a lawsuit that challenges Gov. Josh Shapiro’s creation of an automatic voter registration system. That system was facilitated by a 2021 executive order issued by Biden, which gave states access to federal data to help set up such voting registration. Biden’s order is also being challenged.

The lawsuit claims that both Biden’s order and Shapiro’s creation of the AVR system — which fulfilled a promise he campaigned on — improperly sidelined the state legislature.

A district court dismissed the case, but last month Republicans filed a petition asking the U.S. Supreme Court to intervene. Most observers see that as unlikely. But, as with the Michigan case, any ruling blocking Pennsylvania’s AVR system could create barriers for many potential voters.

Also not entirely resolved is the status of mail ballots with missing or incomplete dates.

A 2022 RNC lawsuit seeking to have those ballots — which numbered over 10,000 in 2020 — thrown out was successful. Lawyers for the American Civil Liberties Union filed their own suit seeking to reverse the ruling, which was rejected. The ACLU could still ask the U.S. Supreme Court to intervene, or take the issue back to a lower court. But it looks likely that the ruling saying the ballots must be rejected will stay in place for the fall.

Nevada

Since 2020, the Silver State has been a hotspot for Republican efforts to stoke fears about illegal voting, based on little evidence.

The Republican National Committee and state GOP are suing Democratic Secretary of State Cisco Aguilar, charging that the state is violating federal voting law by not doing enough to maintain accurate voter rolls. Three counties, the lawsuit alleges, have more registered voters than people eligible to vote, and two more — including Clark County, the state’s key Democratic stronghold — have implausibly high registration rates of over 90%.

Aguilar has called the suit “meritless,” saying the GOP’s claims are based on flawed data, and has sought to have it thrown out.

Conservative groups have in recent years filed numerous similar lawsuits aimed at forcing election officials to more aggressively pare the rolls, and most have failed.

New York

Unlike the other states here, New York isn’t a presidential battleground, but it contains several swing congressional districts that could help determine control of the House.

Voters in the Empire State face uncertainty thanks to a lawsuit filed by the RNC and other Republicans, including Rep. Elise Stefanik, which challenges a Democratic-backed reform, passed last year, allowing voters to cast a mail ballot without an excuse. The plaintiffs allege the law violates the state constitution.

In 2020, when no-excuse mail voting was temporarily allowed because of the pandemic, nearly 2 million New Yorkers — over 20% of total voters — took advantage of it.

A district court dismissed the lawsuit in February, and an appellate court unanimously affirmed that ruling May 9. Four days later, Republicans asked the U.S. Supreme Court to intervene.

Christina Bobb, right, speaking with then Arizona gubernatorial candidate Kari Lake, left, at a "Save America" rally in 2022 in Florence, Arizona. (Photo by Gage Skidmore / Flickr/CC BY-SA 2.0)

Less than a week after the Republican National Committee unveiled a “historic” new program to monitor the polls for fraud, a top lawyer with the committee was among those indicted for an alleged scheme to use false fraud claims to overturn the results of Arizona’s presidential election.

Indeed, the lawyer, RNC senior counsel for election integrity Christina Bobb, was scheduled to appear April 25 at an online meeting to recruit activists for the GOP’s vote-watching effort, though she didn’t show up. The meeting was organized by fringe conspiracy theorists who, like Bobb, have helped spread lies about illegal voting.

Arizona Attorney General Kris Mayes announced the indictments on April 24 against 18 people, seven of whose names are redacted. Multiple news organizations have used details in the indictment to identify Bobb and the other six. Mayes on Friday confirmed Bobb’s indictment.

The confluence of events involving Bobb, the RNC and a loose network of anti-fraud activists underscores how the Trump-controlled GOP appears to be laying the groundwork to contest this year’s election using the same false claims about illegal voting — and even some of the same key figures — as it did in 2020.

Asked for comment on Bobb’s reported indictment and whether she remained employed by the RNC, an RNC spokesperson declined to answer on the record.

Bobb did not respond to an inquiry about her failure to appear at the April 25 event.

GOP’s ‘historic’ vote-monitoring program

The Arizona indictments came less than a week after the Trump campaign and the RNC announced a “historic, 100,000 person strong” effort to closely monitor the voting process, calling it, “the most extensive and monumental election integrity program in the nation’s history.”

“Whenever a ballot is being cast or counted, Republican poll watchers will be observing the process and reporting any irregularity,” the RNC declared in a press release.

The committee called the initiative “an historic collaboration between the RNC, the Trump Campaign, and passionate grassroots coalitions who are deeply invested in fighting voter fraud.” That appeared to be a reference to the party’s outreach to anti-fraud activists like those at Thursday’s meeting — many of whom have bought in to lies about the 2020 election.

Multiple lawsuits found no evidence of systematic or widespread fraud in 2020.

The RNC’s vote-monitoring effort has been championed by Lara Trump, former President Donald Trump’s daughter-in-law, who took over as RNC co-chair in late February. Bobb was announced as an election integrity lawyer at the RNC soon afterward.

Trump is the presumptive Republican nominee for president in 2024.

Lara Trump warned in an April 23 interview that the vote-monitoring program will include “people who can physically handle ballots” at polling places on Election Day. The rules for partisan poll watchers differ from state to state.

17 charged in fake electors plot

Bobb’s failure to attend Thursday’s online meeting, after organizers had promoted her appearance in advance, may have been because she has more urgent matters on her mind.

The indictments filed in Arizona allege a plot to use fake electors to overturn the state’s 2020 presidential vote.

The 11 people named in the indictment are the Arizona fake electors themselves, all Trump allies. The other seven people, whose names are redacted, have been identified by news outlets, including CNN and the New York Times, as Bobb, as well as Trump allies Rudy Giuliani, Mark Meadows, John Eastman, Jenna Ellis, Mike Roman and Boris Epshteyn.

One of the seven, the indictment says, “was an attorney for the Trump Campaign” and “made false claims of widespread election fraud in Arizona and in six other states.” That person also “encouraged the Arizona Legislature to change the outcome of the election,” and “encouraged (Vice President Mike) Pence to accept the false Arizona Republican electors’ votes on January 6, 2021,” according to the indictment.

Bobb joined the Trump campaign as a lawyer in the aftermath of the 2020 vote, and was among the campaign officials, led by Giuliani, who organized a scheme to use false fraud claims as justification for submitting fake electors in seven states Trump lost, including Arizona, CNN has reported.

Bobb also tweeted on January 6, 2021: “@VP @Mike_Pence can solve this now by sending it back to the legislators.”

The indictment lists Trump — unnamed but described as “a former president of the United States who spread false claims of election fraud following the 2020 election” — as an unindicted co-conspirator.

The indictment alleges that as part of the scheme, the fake electors voted for Trump to receive Arizona’s electoral votes, “falsely claiming to be the duly elected and qualified Electors for President and Vice President of the United States from the State of Arizona.”

“Defendants deceived the citizens of Arizona by falsely claiming that those votes were contingent only on a legal challenge that would change the outcome of the election,” the indictment continues. “In reality, Defendants intended that their false votes for Trump-Pence would encourage Pence to reject the Biden-Harris votes on January 6, 2021, regardless of the outcome of the legal challenge.”

RNC courts conspiracy theorists, election deniers

The meeting at which Bobb was scheduled to appear Thursday was organized by two Florida activists with ties to leading election deniers, including MyPillow CEO Mike Lindell, and included hundreds of grassroots anti-fraud activists from across the country.

It follows a similar April 4 event, at which the director of the RNC’s election integrity program, Christina Norton, told activists how to get involved with the party’s vote-monitoring program. States Newsroom attended both virtual meetings.

The April 25 meeting featured a parade of speakers, including the former Democratic consultant Naomi Wolf, making claims about illegal voting in 2020 and 2022, predicting that this year’s vote will be similarly rigged, and rallying supporters to take action.

“The current situation is that President Trump will once again win the presidential election just as he did in 2020,” said one speaker, Greg Stenstrom, a Pennsylvania-based conspiracy theorist who co-authored the book “The Parallel Election: A Blueprint for Deception,” which alleged massive fraud in that state’s 2020 vote.

“But it will be taken from him, and all of us, again, unless we restore fair and honest elections in the short time we have remaining before November. He cannot hold onto the presidency unless we act.”

In place of a live appearance by Bobb, Steve Stern, an organizer of the call, played an interview he’d conducted recently with her for his podcast.

In the interview, Stern asked Bobb what could be done about President Joe Biden’s plan to add “a million illegal aliens” to the voter rolls. (There is no evidence that Biden has such a plan, despite frequent similar claims by the far right.)

Bobb agreed there is a “concerted effort to empower the illegals to cast ballots,” adding: “It’s a very, very, serious issue this time around, and it’s something that we’re looking into … Is it something that law enforcement needs to handle, because there could potentially be a criminal component to it?”

“As far as illegals voting,” Bobb continued, “once they have registered, it’s very hard to undo that process. Because the registration is presumed valid.”

Studies have consistently shown that the amount of voting by non-citizens is minuscule. A 2017 Brennan Center analysis found that suspected — not proven — votes by non-citizens accounted for just 0.0001 percent of all votes cast in the 2016 election.

Other connections

In addition to these two meetings, there have been other recent instances of RNC staff courting right-wing activists who have spread election disinformation.

Bobb spoke last month with the far-right podcaster Breanna Morello. And she joined a recent conference call with several Trump-allied groups that have promoted lies about 2020, the Guardian reported.

Both the April 25 and April 4 meetings were organized by Stern and Raj Doraisamy, two far-right Florida activists and Lindell allies who have helped spread false claims about illegal voting.

Last month, Stern spoke with Steve Bannon, the former Trump adviser, to promote the April 4 meeting. “We have so many illegal aliens in this country,” Stern said. “They want to vote. We gotta stop them.”

Doraisamy was reportedly outside the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, and went on to found a group, Defend Florida, that went door to door to gather thousands of “affidavits” from Floridians in an effort to show that the state’s 2020 election was corrupted by massive fraud.

At a 2022 event organized by the group, Doraisamy thanked Lindell for his help with the door-to-door effort.

Also speaking at the April 25 meeting call was Joe Hoft, whose Gateway Pundit website, co-founded with Hoft’s brother Jim, has been a key vector for the spread of false conspiracy theories about the 2020 election, the covid vaccine, and more.

Joe Hoft’s self-published book, “The Steal,”? is described this way on its Google Books page: “It’s early in the morning of November 4th, President Trump was way ahead in the swing states, but he warned of 4am ballot drops. He was right again. When Americans woke up later that morning, the election had been stolen.”

Another speaker at the meeting, Jay Valentine, used initial funding from Lindell to create voter data monitoring software.

According to documents obtained by the progressive group American Oversight, Valentine has worked closely with Trump lawyer Sidney Powell, a key figure in the effort to overturn the 2020 election, to convince lawmakers in Wisconsin and other states to use his “fractal programming technology” to uncover mass fraud.

“Voter fraud is a nationwide crime perpetrated locally, mostly by Democrats,” Valentine has written separately, promoting the idea of a national election fraud database. “We cannot fight industrial, sovereign, large-scale, election fraud with reports, press releases, and webinars.”

Former U.S. President Donald Trump appears ahead of the start of jury selection at Manhattan Criminal Court on April 15, 2024 in New York City. Former President Donald Trump faces 34 felony counts of falsifying business records in the first of his criminal cases to go to trial. (Photo by Jabin Botsford-Pool/Getty Images)

NEW YORK — The trial of former President Donald Trump kicked off Monday in a lower Manhattan courtroom, marking the first time in U.S. history that an ex-president has been tried on criminal charges.

Trump, the presumptive Republican nominee for president, appeared in the state of New York courtroom, where he is charged with falsifying business records to conceal a sex scandal involving a porn star.

The case, brought by Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg, is one of four state and federal indictments the former president is facing. But because of delays in the other cases, it may be the only one that goes to trial before the November election, significantly boosting its potential political impact.

Jury selection began Monday afternoon, and is expected to last around two weeks.

But before potential jurors were brought in to the courtroom, Justice Juan Merchan announced rulings on several motions.

Merchan said he would reject a motion from Trump’s defense team which cited alleged conflicts of interest involving the judge’s family and asked him to step down from the case.

“There is no agenda here,” Merchan said, adding: “We want to follow the law. We want justice to be done.”

But Merchan said he would not allow the prosecution to introduce evidence about allegations that Trump committed sexual assaults, calling the claims “rumors.”

Bragg’s team wanted jurors to hear the claims, made in the leadup to the 2016 election, to bolster their case that Trump schemed to hide evidence of an affair, because he was worried about losing support from women voters.

Merchan also said he would not allow the jury to hear the “Access Hollywood” tape, but that prosecutors could introduce into evidence comments made by Trump and caught on the tape. In the recording, which emerged shortly before the 2016 election, Trump brags about grabbing women’s genitals, adding: “When you’re a star, they let you do it.”

Prosecutors asked Merchan Monday to fine Trump for violating an April 1 gag order imposed by the judge. In recent social media posts, Trump attacked Michael Cohen, his former fixer, and the porn star Stormy Daniels.

Merchan said he would hear arguments April 23 on that issue.

Cohen, a former lawyer who has fallen out with Trump, is expected to be a key witness in the case, and Daniels also may testify. Defense lawyers have not yet said whether Trump will testify in his own defense.

Payments to Daniels

At the center of the case are payments totaling $130,000 to Daniels, made by Cohen in the closing weeks of the 2016 election campaign. Cohen admitted in his plea deal the payments were aimed at buying Daniels’ silence about an affair she says she had with Trump a decade earlier.

Trump faces 34 felony counts, and he could face a maximum of four years in prison if convicted. But Merchan also could sentence him to probation without prison time.

Legal experts have noted a major challenge facing Bragg: In New York state, falsifying business records on its own is a misdemeanor, not a felony. But it becomes a felony if the falsification was done to conceal another crime.

Bragg alleges that Trump intended to conceal state and federal campaign finance violations. The payments, prosecutors allege, were illegal and unreported donations to Trump’s campaign, because if Daniels’ story became public, it could have damaged Trump’s image when voters went to the polls.

Bragg also alleges that Trump intended to conceal a tax crime stemming from how Cohen was reimbursed for the payments to Daniels.

Prosecutors don’t need to prove beyond a reasonable doubt that Trump committed these alleged underlying crimes. But they do need to show that Trump intended to conceal them — something defense lawyers are expected to strongly contest.

Political effect

The most important impact of any Trump conviction could be political. Most polling averages currently give Trump a very slim lead over President Joe Biden. But there is some evidence that if Trump were to be convicted of a felony, a small but significant slice of the electorate would be less likely to support him.

Though the charges in the case may seem simultaneously salacious and dry — prosecutors will present reams of sometimes arcane corporate documents — democracy advocates say it in fact involves important principles, and centers on a scheme to undermine a fair election.

“This is not a case solely about hush money payments,” Norm Eisen, a legal analyst and prominent Trump critic who was Democratic co-counsel for the U.S. House Judiciary Committee during Trump’s first impeachment, told reporters Thursday. “It’s about Trump’s alleged actions to hide information from voters to cover up election interference.”

In a small park outside the Manhattan Criminal Court, Trump supporters gathered Monday to affirm their loyalty to the former president, and to lambaste the trial — as Trump himself has frequently done — as a politically motivated witch hunt.

“What’s happening in that courtroom is a total sham,” said Steve Merczynski, of New York City, who wore a hand-embroidered scarf declaring “MAGA again.”

“This is all run by the Biden criminal administration,” Merczynski added. (There is no evidence that the Biden administration influenced the prosecution.)

Another Trump supporter, Dion Cini, said he didn’t want to judge Trump’s personal life.

“I’ve been to Thailand three times,” said Cini, a New Yorker who was once banned from Disney World for holding a Trump 2020 flag on Splash Mountain. “What do you think I do in Thailand, just sit in a chair? No, I go out and have fun and meet women. That’s what we do as men.”

Among the few anti-Trump demonstrators was Marc Leavitt, who stood on a park bench as he played the national anthem and other patriotic songs on a flute.

“I think the rule of law should proceed appropriately, and that’s what’s happening today,” said Leavitt. “And that’s a very good thing for America.”

The director of the Republican National Committee’s department for “election integrity” spoke at an online meeting hosted by two Florida activists who are close allies of the pillow entrepreneur and leading election-conspiracy theorist Mike Lindell, pictured above. (Photo by Stephen Maturen/Getty Images)

As the Republican National Committee ramps up plans to monitor the polls for illegal voting this fall, the national party is increasingly working with a loose network of anti-fraud extremists who have been found to routinely spread election lies.

The extremists also have close ties to the prominent far-right conspiracy theorists who tried to overturn the 2020 results of the presidential election.

The director of the Republican National Committee’s department for “election integrity” — tighter voting rules that prioritize anti-fraud measures over access — spoke at an April 4 online meeting hosted by two Florida activists who are close allies of the pillow entrepreneur and leading election-conspiracy theorist Mike Lindell.

States Newsroom attended the meeting, and video of it was posted online by the organizers.

It was just one of several recent episodes in which top RNC staff have reached out to large-scale purveyors of election falsehoods or right-wing extremists as the party recruits volunteers to guard the vote.

Election officials and election administration experts have repeatedly said there is no evidence of large-scale fraud or illegal voting in the 2020 election. Hundreds of lawsuits intended to uncover significant fraud have found very little.

The GOP’s growing outreach to these groups serves as the latest warning about the threat to this fall’s vote that could still be posed by the “big lie” that the 2020 election was stolen, election experts say.

“It’s one thing when fringe conspiracy theorists spread lies about elections,” said David Becker, an election administration expert who founded and runs the Center for Election Innovation and Research. “But it’s particularly disappointing to see a major political party give a platform to extremists whose testimony and statements have been found time and again to be false, and non-credible by the courts.”

“On the issue of democracy, today’s Republican Party is more irresponsible and more dangerous than it was in 2020,” said Marc Elias, a top Democratic election lawyer, in a statement that blasted the GOP’s effort to “court and nurture a network of right-wing election vigilantes.”

A spokesperson for the RNC did not respond to States Newsroom’s request for comment.

Recruiting volunteer voting monitors

At the April 4 meeting, RNC election integrity director Christina Norton laid out the party’s plan to closely monitor the voting process, especially in swing states. Norton explained how the volunteers in attendance, eager to root out voter fraud, could get involved.

“We don’t see this program as being siloed or separate,” said Norton, a former deputy director of the Republican National Lawyers Association and a veteran of Florida GOP politics. “This is a full partnership with the grassroots and the local activists on the ground.”

Soon after, Seth Keshel, a retired U.S. Army intelligence officer, began his own presentation, stressing that Republicans would face a challenge to overcome what he said is mass Democratic fraud in states across the country.

Based on his own “quick count” done before the call, Keshel said, five key counties in North Carolina saw a total of 150,000 fraudulent votes in the 2020 election.

There’s also “big-time abuse” in Madison, Wisconsin, said Keshel, who has made frequent presentations across the country, using comparisons of vote totals in past elections to falsely claim that the 2020 election was stolen.

Milwaukee, too, has a “big-time ballot harvesting scene,” he said.

As for Arizona, Keshel declared, the state’s two largest counties are “where the cheating is going on,” though Democrats are also “stuffing margins in the event of a close race” in other parts of the state.

“The corruption of elections is based on the corruption of voter rolls, and everything springs forward from that,” Keshel said.

Neither Norton nor anyone else on the call, which organizers said reached its Zoom capacity of 500 attendees, with around 1000 more watching a livestream, objected to Keshel’s claims, for which he provided no evidence.

Jessica Marsden, a counsel at Protect Democracy, a democracy advocacy group, said it’s become common for anti-fraud activists to style themselves as data experts, and to use scraps of information to build complex conspiracy theories.

“There’s this common thread of almost pseudo-science,” said Marsden. “These fraud theories have been totally debunked, but the aura of expertise that they bring to the effort seems to be seductive to some of these audiences.”

Claims about immigrants

To promote the April 4 meeting in advance, its two hosts, Steve Stern and Raj Doraisamy, used what have been found to be lies about the threat of voting by undocumented immigrants.

In a March 26 appearance on “War Room,” the popular podcast hosted by Steve Bannon, who served as a Trump White House adviser, Stern promised:? “We have so many illegal aliens in this country. They want to vote. We gotta stop them. We’re gonna tell you on April 4th how to do this.”

Bannon urged listeners to join the call, telling Stern: “You’re the best.”

A mass April 3 email sent by Doraisamy included a screenshot of a viral post on X charging that “8 million illegal aliens have invaded America under Biden,” and falsely suggesting that they’re being deliberately allowed in so that they can illegally vote for Democrats.

Thanks to this scheme, “the risk of Trump losing is now higher than ever,” Doraisamy wrote, urging readers to attend the meeting.

In fact, the claim in the post, which was also promoted by X owner Elon Musk to his over 180 million followers, is riddled with flaws, as the progressive journalist Judd Legum has shown.

Politifact has rated the claim that 8 million undocumented people have entered the country during the Biden presidency “mostly false.”

RNC courts fringe

In addition to filing a slew of lawsuits aimed at restricting voting, the RNC is planning a ground operation of volunteers to aggressively monitor the voting process.

A Trump campaign spokesperson promised in a TV appearance last month that there would be “soldiers — poll watchers, on the ground, who are making sure that there are no irregularities and fraud like we saw in the last election cycle.”?

Meanwhile, a leadership change has increased Trump’s control over the national party.

In late February, Ronna McDaniel, whom Trump backers had criticized as out of touch with the grassroots, stepped down as chair. She was replaced by Lara Trump, Trump’s daughter-in-law, and Michael Whatley, the former chair of the North Carolina GOP, who has emphasized the election integrity issue.

In an April 7 interview, Whatley avoided answering whether the 2020 election had been stolen.

Speaking on Fox News in March, Lara Trump pledged that the election integrity department would receive “massive resources.”

In recent weeks, the RNC has been at pains to show conservative activists — including those who have played key roles in spreading election lies — that it needs their help.

Gates McGavick, a senior adviser to Whatley and the RNC’s top spokesperson on election integrity issues, joined Stern’s podcast last month.

“We want to have open communication with the grassroots. We want to be providing as many resources as we possibly can to the grassroots,” McGavick told Stern. “Our election integrity department is a huge part of how we do that.”

And Christina Bobb, a former Trump lawyer who played a role in the Trump campaign’s “fake elector” scheme and was recently hired as a top RNC attorney, spoke with the far-right podcaster Breanna Morello last month. ?

“The most important aspect of election integrity from the RNC is empowering the grassroots to do what the grassroots does,” Bobb told Morello.

Bobb also joined a conference call last month with several Trump-allied groups that have spread lies about 2020, the Guardian reported.

The RNC appears not to have publicized any of these meetings, including the April 4 event with Norton, on its social media accounts or its website.

But for activists like Stern, who were used to being kept at arm’s length by the national party, the RNC’s new approach is a godsend.

“I think the RNC is the most important thing here,” Stern told Bannon as he previewed the April 4 meeting. “We’ve never been able to do this with Ronna McDaniel. But they’re coming to us now because they realize the grassroots are the important people in this country, that are going to save this country.”

Ties to conspiracy theorists

The April 4 meeting’s two organizers, Stern and Doraisamy, both have close ties to Lindell, as do several of the other speakers, who have been key spreaders of baseless claims about mass voter fraud.

Lindell spoke at a March 11 event Stern organized, video of which was posted online, to raise money and recruit conservative activists, held at Trump International Golf Club. “There is no more important patriot in this United States than Mike Lindell,” Stern declared as he introduced the conspiracy theorist.

Doraisamy was outside the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, the Sarasota Herald-Tribune has reported, and went on to found a group, Defend Florida, that went door to door to gather thousands of “affidavits” from Floridians in an effort to show that the state’s 2020 election was corrupted by massive fraud. Election officials have said there’s no evidence for that.

At a 2022 event celebrating the signing into law of a controversial state measure creating an election crimes unit, which Defend Florida said was spurred by their work, Doraisamy thanked Lindell for his help with transportation for the door-to-door effort.

“We could not have been able to do that without your help,” Doraisamy said.

A 2021 Defend Florida rally included numerous Proud Boys, the self-described “western chauvinist” group that played a key role in the events of Jan. 6, the Sarasota Herald-Tribune reported.

Grassroots activists spread fraud claims

Another speaker on the April 4 call, Linda Szynkowicz, the Connecticut-based founder of FightVoterFraud.org, claimed recently on Stern’s podcast that her team has gathered evidence of election violations committed by over 40,000 people across the country. “Most of them are class D felonies,” she added.

In Connecticut alone, Szynkowicz said, her group has found around 11,000 people that potentially can be proven to have violated election laws. She provided no evidence for the claim

“I always have to say ‘potentially’ because I’m not law enforcement,” Szynkowicz added. “But we know we got ‘em.”

Also given a speaking spot at the April 4 meeting was Linda Rantz, who runs the Missouri chapter of Cause of America, a group that Lindell founded with the goal of getting rid of voting machines.

Another speaker, Jay Valentine, used initial funding from Lindell, the Texas Tribune has reported, to create voter data monitoring software.

According to documents obtained by the progressive group American Oversight, Valentine has worked closely with Trump lawyer Sidney Powell, a key figure in the effort to overturn the 2020 election, to convince lawmakers in Wisconsin and other states to use his “fractal programming technology” to uncover mass fraud.

“Voter fraud is a nationwide crime perpetrated locally, mostly by Democrats,” Valentine has written separately, promoting the idea of a national election fraud database. “We cannot fight industrial, sovereign, large-scale, election fraud with reports, press releases, and webinars.”

Yet another April 4 speaker, Marly Hornik, founded New York Citizens Audit, which she has said conducted an “open-source audit” of the state’s voter registration database.

“We have found millions and millions of registrations that are clear violations of New York state election law,” Hornik said last year on The Lindell Report, a TV show and podcast started by Lindell. “The database is being manipulated. We have hard evidence of that.”

Last year, New York Citizens Audit received a cease and desist letter from the state attorney general, charging that the group’s volunteers “confronted voters across the state at their homes, falsely claimed to be Board of Elections officials, and falsely accused voters of committing felony voter fraud.”

To those working for a fair and peaceful election this year, it all adds up to a major concern.

“Lying about election fraud is dangerous, plain and simple,” said Marsden of Protect Democracy, noting the Jan. 6 insurrection, as well as threats leveled against election workers. “Having a major political party sign on to those lies and lend them credibility is reckless and heightens the risk of violence affecting voters and the election.”

Concern over illegal immigration and border security was Donald Trump’s central campaign issue when he won the presidency in 2016, and polls show it as the GOP’s most potent political weapon again in 2024. (Photo by John Moore/Getty Images)

With polls showing unauthorized immigration as Republicans’ best issue for the fall, the GOP is looking to raise the alarm about voting by non-citizens and the undocumented.

On the November ballot in Kentucky

Although Kentucky law already excludes noncitizens from registering to vote, Kentuckians will get a chance to enshrine the prohibition in the state Constitution in November.

The Republican-controlled legislature has put two amendments on the ballot, which also will include all the state House and half the Senate seats, as well as U.S. Congress, local offices and the race for U.S. president.

One amendment would end the constitutional ban on spending public money on private schools, paving the way for the legislature to approve charter schools and vouchers.

The other would specify: “No person who is not a citizen of the United States shall be allowed to vote in this state.”

The legislature also passed a bill requiring the Administrative Office of the Courts to send a list of people who were excused from jury duty because they’re not U.S. citizens to the attorney general, the United States attorney and the State Board of Elections. It instructs the elections board to remove anyone on the list from the voter rolls within five days. Democratic Gov. Andy Beshear vetoed the bill, citing another of its provisions.

Kentucky governors lack veto power over constitutional amendments, which require a three-fifths vote of the legislature.

The multi-pronged effort has been advanced in congressional legislation, public statements by top election officials and U.S. senators, plans produced by grassroots activists, and posts on X by former President Donald Trump and others.

Concern over illegal immigration and border security was Trump’s central campaign issue when he won the presidency in 2016, and polls show it as the GOP’s most potent political weapon again in 2024. A Feb. 27 Gallup poll found 28% of respondents saw it as the country’s most important issue, well ahead of any other topic.

At an April 2 rally in Michigan, Trump seized on the recent murder of a local woman, Ruby Garcia, who law enforcement has alleged was killed by her undocumented boyfriend.

“We threw him out of the country and crooked Joe Biden let him back in and let him stay and he viciously killed Ruby,” said Trump.

But the party is also using the issue to bolster its ongoing push to stoke fear about voter fraud and press for more restrictive voting rules. And it has often trafficked in false and misleading claims about voting by undocumented immigrants.

Voter fraud claims

Voting by non-citizens is extremely rare. That’s because, voting advocates say, non-citizens are especially careful not to do anything that might jeopardize their status in the country.

A voter fraud database run by the conservative Heritage Foundation, which covers several decades in which billions of votes have been cast across the country, contains 29 entries that mention non-citizens. In some of these, a non-citizen registered but did not vote.

Still, over the last few weeks, Republican secretaries of state from Georgia, Mississippi, and Alabama, and at least two U.S. Senate Republicans, were the latest to tout the issue.

Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger wrote in a March 12 op-ed that “leftist-activist allies” of President Joe Biden “want to open the gate to non-citizen voting.”

At issue is a lawsuit challenging a Georgia measure requiring people registering to vote to show documentary proof of citizenship.

The voting-rights advocates behind the suit say the requirement isn’t needed, and can present a barrier to registration for some voters, especially naturalized citizens, who may not have easy access to citizenship documents.

In the op-ed, Raffensperger, who famously resisted Trump’s pressure to collude in subverting Georgia’s 2020 election results, sought to conflate the issue of illegal voting by the undocumented with burgeoning efforts by a few Democratic-led cities, including Washington, D.C., to allow legal non-citizens to vote in local elections.

He has pushed for a constitutional amendment in Georgia that would bar local governments in the state from enfranchising non-citizens.

“Leftist activists have already shown that they want to change the laws that require voters to be U.S. citizens,” Raffensperger wrote. “A constitutional amendment would eliminate any possibility for future efforts to change those laws.”

Warning on DOJ program

Days earlier, Mississippi Secretary of State Michael Watson sent a letter to the U.S. Justice Department, warning that a federal program aimed at making voter registration easier for people in the custody of the U.S. Marshals Service and the Bureau of Prison could lead to the registration not only of ineligible felons but also of the undocumented.

“Due to the Biden Administration’s border policies, millions of illegal aliens have not only been allowed into this country during the last three years, but they have also been allowed to stay. Many of these aliens have been in the custody of an agency of the Department of Justice including the Marshals,” Watson wrote in the letter, which his office provided to States Newsroom.

“Providing ineligible non-citizens with information on how to register to vote undoubtedly encourages them to illegally register to vote.”

The Justice Department program is part of the Biden administration’s response to the president’s sweeping 2021 executive order aimed at using federal government agencies to expand access to voter registration. Republicans have condemned the order as an improper attempt to use public resources to advance partisan political goals. There is no evidence the order has led to ineligible voters being added to the rolls.

Alabama Secretary of State Wes Allen, as well as Sen. Katie Britt, R-Ala., also sought to raise concerns about non-citizen voting in an exchange at a March 12 hearing of the U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee. The two Alabama Republicans charged that the federal government has denied election officials the tools they need to verify citizenship.

“I think (verifying citizenship) is important, now more than ever, especially given what’s happening at the southern border,” said Allen, who was testifying before the panel.

At the same hearing, Sen. Mike Lee, R-Utah, used his time to ask the witnesses if they agreed that only U.S. citizens should be able to vote in federal elections — something that’s already the law — and that people registering to vote should have to show proof of citizenship. Lee later sent out a clip of the exchange on X.?

Memo calls for proof of citizenship to register

Also last month, the conservative voting activist Cleta Mitchell, who played a key role in Trump’s bid to overturn the 2020 election, circulated a memo on “the threat of non-citizen voting in 2024.” The memo, posted online by a conservative advocacy group, called for a federal law requiring people to show proof of citizenship when registering, among other steps.

“There are myriad left-wing advocacy groups who register illegals to vote,” Mitchell wrote, a charge for which she did not provide evidence.

But the party’s efforts to tie together voting and immigration have been underway for longer in this election cycle. Last March, as States Newsroom reported, a group of prominent conservative election activists came together to promote what they called a national campaign to “protect voting at all levels of government as the exclusive right of citizens.”

Months later, congressional Republicans unveiled a sweeping elections bill, which aimed to capture the GOP’s top priorities in its push to tighten voting rules, and which contained a full section on stopping non-citizen voting.

Among other steps, the measure would give states more access to federal data on citizenship and make it easier for them to remove people flagged as non-citizens from the rolls. It also would penalize states where non-citizens can vote in local elections by cutting their share of federal election funding.

While Democrats control the Senate and White House, the bill has little chance of becoming law.

Legislation on non-citizen voting

Separately, in the current session of Congress alone, the House Administration Committee has passed seven different bills addressing non-citizen voting.

Last year, the House voted to use Congress’ authority over the District of Columbia to overturn D.C.’s law enfranchising non-citizens — the first time the House had voted to overturn a District bill since 2015. The Senate didn’t take up the bill.

One Republican lawmaker introduced a resolution calling for a constitutional amendment to ban non-citizen voting.

Legal non-citizen voting has a long history in the U.S. In the middle of the 19th century, at least 16 states passed measures enfranchising non-citizens, often to lure workers to underpopulated western states.

These laws were gradually repealed in the late 19th and early 20th century — a period when a more general anxiety about mass voting led to Jim Crow laws in the South and laws restricting voting by Catholic and Jewish immigrants in the north.

Some prominent figures have falsely suggested that Democrats are soft-pedaling border security so they can benefit from the votes of the undocumented.

“That’s why they are allowing these people to come in — people that don’t speak our language — they are signing them up to vote,” Trump said at a January rally in Iowa. “And I believe that’s why you are having millions of people pour into our country and it could very well affect the next election. That’s why they are doing it.”

Elon Musk, the billionaire tech entrepreneur, has taken a similar view.

“Dems won’t deport, because every illegal is a highly likely vote at some point,” Musk told his over 170 million followers in a Feb. 26 post on X, which he owns, commenting on news that an undocumented immigrant hadn’t been deported despite a string of arrests. “That simple incentive explains what seems to be insane behavior.”

U.S. Sen. J.D. Vance, R-Ohio, charged in a 2022 TV ad: “Joe Biden’s open border is killing Ohioans with more illegal drugs and more Democrat voters pouring into this country.”

Kansas law

One figure who may have done more than any to promote the threat of voting by non-citizens is Kansas Attorney General Kris Kobach. As the state’s secretary of state, Kobach pushed for a law requiring voter registrants to provide proof of citizenship.

The law was ultimately struck down by a federal court, which found “no credible evidence” that a significant number of non-citizens had registered to vote before it was implemented. The law was responsible for keeping tens of thousands of voter registration applications in limbo during an election.

Kobach went on to chair a voter fraud commission created in 2017 by the Trump White House, which pushed for a federal law similar to the Kansas law. The panel disbanded the following year without providing evidence of widespread voter fraud.

The AI threat has emerged at a time when democracy advocates already are deeply concerned about the potential for “ordinary” online disinformation to confuse voters. (Getty Images)

This year’s presidential election will be the first since generative AI — a form of artificial intelligence that can create new content, including images, audio, and video — became widely available. That’s raising fears that millions of voters could be deceived by a barrage of political deepfakes.

But, while Congress has done little to address the issue, states are moving aggressively to respond — though questions remain about how effective any new measures to combat AI-created disinformation will be.

Last year, a fake, AI-generated audio recording of a conversation between a liberal Slovakian politician and a journalist, in which they discussed how to rig the country’s upcoming election, offered a warning to democracies around the world.

Here in the United States, the urgency of the AI threat was driven home in February, when, in the days before the New Hampshire primary, thousands of voters in the state received a robocall with an AI-generated voice impersonating President Joe Biden, urging them not to vote. A Democratic operative working for a rival candidate has admitted to commissioning the calls.

In response to the call, the Federal Communications Commission issued a ruling restricting robocalls that contain AI-generated voices.

Some conservative groups even appear to be using AI tools to assist with mass voter registration challenges — raising concerns that the technology could be harnessed to help existing voter suppression schemes.?

“Instead of voters looking to trusted sources of information about elections, including their state or county board of elections, AI-generated content can grab the voters’ attention,” said Megan Bellamy, vice president for law and policy at the Voting Rights Lab, an advocacy group that tracks election-related state legislation. “And this can lead to chaos and confusion leading up to and even after Election Day.”

Disinformation worries

The AI threat has emerged at a time when democracy advocates already are deeply concerned about the potential for “ordinary” online disinformation to confuse voters, and when allies of former president Donald Trump appear to be having success in fighting off efforts to curb disinformation.

But states are responding to the AI threat. Since the start of last year, 101 bills addressing AI and election disinformation have been introduced, according to a March 26 analysis by the Voting Rights Lab.

On March 27, Oregon became the latest state — after Wisconsin, New Mexico, Indiana and Utah — to enact a law on AI-generated election disinformation. Florida and Idaho lawmakers have passed their own measures, which are currently on the desks of those states’ governors.

Arizona, Georgia, Iowa and Hawaii, meanwhile, have all passed at least one bill — in the case of Arizona, two — through one chamber.

As that list of states makes clear, red, blue, and purple states all have devoted attention to the issue.

States urged to act

Meanwhile, a new report on how to combat the AI threat to elections, drawing on input from four Democratic secretaries of state, was released March 25 by the NewDEAL Forum, a progressive advocacy group.

“(G)enerative AI has the ability to drastically increase the spread of election mis- and disinformation and cause confusion among voters,” the report warned. “For instance, ‘deepfakes’ (AI-generated images, voices, or videos) could be used to portray a candidate saying or doing things that never happened.”

The NewDEAL Forum report urges states to take several steps to respond to the threat, including requiring that certain kinds of AI-generated campaign material be clearly labeled; conducting role-playing exercises to help anticipate the problems that AI could cause; creating rapid-response systems for communicating with voters and the media, in order to knock down AI-generated disinformation; and educating the public ahead of time.

Secretaries of State Steve Simon of Minnesota, Jocelyn Benson of Michigan, Maggie Toulouse Oliver of New Mexico and Adrian Fontes of Arizona provided input for the report. All four are actively working to prepare their states on the issue.

Loopholes seen

Despite the flurry of activity by lawmakers, officials, and outside experts, several of the measures examined in the Voting Rights Lab analysis appear to have weaknesses or loopholes that may raise questions about their ability to effectively protect voters from AI.

Most of the bills require that creators add a disclaimer to any AI-generated content, noting the use of AI, as the NewDEAL Forum report recommends.

But the new Wisconsin law, for instance, requires the disclaimer only for content created by campaigns, meaning deepfakes produced by outside groups but intended to influence an election — hardly an unlikely scenario — would be unaffected.

In addition, the measure is limited to content produced by generative AI, even though experts say other types of synthetic content that don’t use AI, like Photoshop and CGI — sometimes referred to as “cheap fakes” — can be just as effective at fooling viewers or listeners, and can be more easily produced.

For that reason, the NewDEAL Forum report recommends that state laws cover all synthetic content, not just that which use AI.

The Wisconsin, Utah, and Indiana laws also contain no criminal penalties — violations are punishable by a $1000 fine — raising questions about whether they will work as a deterrent.

The Arizona and Florida bills do include criminal penalties. But Arizona’s two bills apply only to digital impersonation of a candidate, meaning plenty of other forms of AI-generated deception — impersonating a news anchor reporting a story, for instance — would remain legal.

And one of the Arizona bills, as well as New Mexico’s law, applied only in the 90 days before an election, even though AI-generated content that appears before that window could potentially still affect the vote.

Experts say the shortcomings exist in large part because, since the threat is so new, states don’t yet have a clear sense of exactly what form it will take.

“The legislative bodies are trying to figure out the best approach, and they’re working off of examples that they’ve already seen,” said Bellamy, pointing to the examples of the Slovakian audio and the Biden robocalls.

“They’re just not sure what direction this is coming from, but feeling the need to do something.”

“I think that we will see the solutions evolve,” Bellamy added. “The danger of that is that AI-generated content and what it can do is also likely to evolve at the same time. So hopefully we can keep up.”

A loose coalition of Republican-led states, often led by Alabama Attorney General Steve Marshall, shown above,?has advanced a string of arguments that appear designed to lay the groundwork for GOP legal victories in the event of a contested presidential vote.?(Stew Milne for Alabama Reflector

With less than six months before voting begins, the legal jousting over the rules for the 2024 election is already underway. And former President Donald Trump’s campaign is getting support from allies who have stayed mostly under the national radar: red-state attorneys general.

In court filings made in recent months, these chief state legal officers have advanced a string of arguments — some strikingly far-reaching — that appear designed to lay the groundwork for Republican legal victories in the event of a contested presidential vote, or to otherwise boost Trump and the GOP.

Often led by Alabama Attorney General Steve Marshall, a loose coalition of Republican-led states has submitted briefs urging judges to:

• Throw out certain mail ballots,
• Weaken long-standing protections against racial discrimination in voting,
• Green-light gerrymandered district maps,
• And empower partisan state legislatures, rather than courts, to set election rules.

“These are all setting up an argument, potentially, to say that the 2024 election was flawed because of all these state practices that are questionable,” said Paul Nolette, a political science professor at Marquette University in Milwaukee who has written in depth on the role of state AGs. “The AGs just have been critical in pushing these arguments.”

Marshall’s office did not respond to a request to comment for this story. But last month Marshall also led a coalition of red states in submitting an amicus brief urging the Supreme Court to pause Trump’s election subversion trial tied to the events of Jan. 6, 2021 — a stance that aligned the group perfectly with the interests of the Trump campaign. Kentucky’s Attorney General Russell Coleman, who took office in January, is part of that group.

And in 2020, many of these same state AGs, including Marshall, sought to have the courts overturn Trump’s election loss.

An election decided in the courts?

The danger of outright election subversion this year appears to have receded somewhat, election law experts have said, thanks to important federal legislation and the results of the last midterms. But the chances that the election will be contested, and ultimately settled in the courts, remain very high.

In that scenario, advocates and experts say, these Republican AGs look well-placed to provide the kinds of conservative legal arguments that could prove pivotal, both by directly influencing court decisions and by infiltrating the broader public debate.

But many of these claims, democracy advocates warn — especially those that support new voting restrictions, reduce the power of minority voters, or undermine courts’ authority to set election rules — could threaten fair elections.

“A huge part of the overall anti-democracy movement is really based on continuing to find ways to use legal tactics as a jumping-off point to spread the election denier message,” said Lizzie Ulmer, senior vice president of strategy and communications for States United Democracy Center, a pro-democracy group.

“There are good and pro-democracy state AGs on both sides of the aisle. But the truth is there are AGs in office right now that have the potential to do real harm. And we’ve seen that in the past and we’re seeing it today.”

Growing politicization

The involvement of the Republican AGs in elections cases with national stakes marks the latest step in a decades-long trend toward AGs taking on more politicized roles.

In less polarized times, experts say, state AGs mostly presented as apolitical prosecutors, and frequently teamed up across party lines to tackle issues of public concern.

That began to shift in earnest during the George W. Bush administration, when Democratic AGs used a series of splashy lawsuits against Wall Street firms and corporate polluters, among others, to advance national policy and political goals — and to boost their own national profiles.

But in the Trump era, the shift has intensified. Several close observers said a key moment came in 2017, when Republicans sought to oust then-Virginia AG Mark Herring, a Democrat — ending a long-standing custom in which neither party spent money targeting incumbent AGs of the other party. Herring ultimately won re-election, but that cycle saw record campaign spending on AG races.

In Republican-led states, the politicization of AG offices reached its height around the 2020 election, centered around the Republican Attorneys General Association, an advocacy group for Republican AGs. In the leadup to the events of Jan. 6, 2021, the group’s fundraising arm, the Rule of Law Defense Fund, sent robocalls urging people to gather for a march to the U.S. Capitol to “stop the steal” and “protect the integrity of our elections.”

Marshall, the Alabama AG, served as chair of RLDF at the time, and has said he was unaware of the robocalls. He has declined to say whether RAGA or RLDF staff were at the Capitol on Jan. 6, and his office has denied public records requests by the Alabama Political Reporter for his calendars covering the period.

Along with other Republican AGs, Marshall sought to cast doubt on the 2020 election results, telling Newsmax not long after the vote: “We obviously have concerns about some of the issues, specifically of irregularities and fraud in other places.”

On Dec. 10, 2020, Marshall and other Republican AGs joined Trump for a meeting at the White House. A day earlier, Marshall had announced that Alabama would join a lawsuit filed by Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton seeking to overturn the results in Pennsylvania and three other states narrowly won by Joe Biden. Seventeen Republican-led states ultimately signed on to the Texas case.

Idaho AG disagreed

One state that didn’t join the suit was Idaho, whose AG at the time, Republican Lawrence Wasden, saw the Texas lawsuit as an improper attempt to use the AG’s office to make policy — and to interfere in other states’ business.

“The policy-making function under both the state and federal constitutions is clearly put in the hands of the legislative branch of government,” Wasden told States Newsroom. “The AG is an executive officer, and does not have those powers. That’s not how we should make public policy.”

After 20 years in office, Wasden lost his 2022 re-election bid in the Republican primary to former U.S. Rep. Raul Labrador — a defeat Wasden attributes to GOP voter anger at his decision not to join the Texas case. But he hasn’t wavered in his view that it was the right call.

“If Texas can control or influence the outcome of the election in Pennsylvania, then California can influence the election in Idaho,” Wasden said. “And that is not how federalism works.”

Labrador was elected attorney general later that year, and has signed Idaho on to several of the elections cases brought by Republican AGs.

As for Marshall, in 2021, he withdrew Alabama from the bipartisan National Association of Attorneys General, saying the group had “moved too far to the left.” The next year, Texas, Missouri, and Montana followed suit.

In 2022, Marshall declined to say, when asked under oath while testifying before Congress, that Biden was “duly elected,” answering only that “he is the president of this country.”

Months later, Marshall was elected chair of RAGA. Now, he’s leading the charge among Republican AGs on election cases with an eye on 2024.

Weakening voting protections

Marshall has battled on behalf of strict voting laws in his own state.

His office energetically, and successfully, fought off a 2020 court challenge to an Alabama law that bars people with past convictions from casting a ballot. In that year’s election, he also succeeded in getting the Supreme Court to block an effort to allow curbside voting, which voting advocates said could offer easier access for elderly and disabled voters .

But it’s Marshall’s work on behalf of Republicans looking to influence election rules far beyond the Yellowhammer State that could have an even greater impact.

In January, Marshall led a coalition of 17 red states that submitted an amicus brief supporting a bid by national Republicans to require Pennsylvania to reject mail ballots with incorrect or missing dates.

In Pennsylvania’s 2020 election, there were over 10,000 such ballots, and how the case is resolved could help determine the winner of this pivotal swing state, if the result is very close. Democrats have voted by mail at significantly higher rates than Republicans in recent elections.

But the impact could be broader still. A district court found last year that the missing or incorrect dates are irrelevant to establishing a vote’s legitimacy.

That means, the court ruled, that under the materiality provision of civil rights law — first included in the 1964 Civil Rights Act, then extended to cover non-federal elections in the Voting Rights Act the following year — a missing or incorrect date can’t be used as a reason to reject a vote.

In their brief, Alabama and the other states called the district court’s ruling “seriously misguided.”

They argued that the materiality provision should be read more narrowly, and doesn’t bar states from imposing reasonable ballot integrity measures. And, they claimed, the provision contains no “private right of action,” meaning it can be enforced only by the U.S. Justice Department, not by the civil rights groups involved in the Pennsylvania case.

By itself, making the materiality provision harder to use would likely have only a limited impact, since it hasn’t been among the tools most commonly used to protect voting rights, noted Cameron Kistler, counsel at Protect Democracy, a nonpartisan democracy advocacy group.

But, he said, it comes in the context of other ongoing conservative legal attacks on voting protections — including attempts to weaken the Voting Rights Act, and suggestions by the Supreme Court that it may lower the level of scrutiny it applies to voting laws that are accused of harming voters.

“The tools that you’d use to ensure free and fair elections are slowly being pulled away,” said Kistler. “When you take them all together, that’s when it starts to get really problematic.”

Voting Rights Act

As if to prove the point, a separate amicus brief submitted in December by Marshall’s office argued that Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act — the law’s most important plank, since the Supreme Court neutered Section 5 a decade ago — also contains no private right of action.

Marshall and his allies were urging a federal appeals court to reverse a ruling striking down Louisiana’s congressional map as a racial gerrymander under Section 2.

The notion that Section 2 contains no private right of action had until recently been seen by many advocates as outlandish. But a federal judge endorsed it in a separate 2022 case involving an Arkansas redistricting plan, brought by Arkansas Attorney General Tim Griffin, a Republican, who has signed his state on to several of Marshall’s amicus briefs. That decision was upheld on appeal in December.

The issue is likely to come before the Supreme Court. A ruling for Arkansas could dramatically limit the power of the VRA to stop racial discrimination in voting.

Separately, Marshall has sought to defend Alabama’s own redistricting plan. In arguing that the state should not have to draw a new map with an additional majority-Black district, his office adopted an interpretation of the VRA that, experts said, would have made it all but impossible to use for stopping racial gerrymanders.

Nicholas Stephanopoulos, a prominent election law scholar at Harvard Law School, has called Alabama’s approach to the question “directly contrary to 40 years of precedent.”

The claim was too extreme even for the conservative-dominated Supreme Court, which ultimately ordered Alabama to create a new map.

In response, Marshall signaled an agenda that went well beyond Alabama.

“There should be nothing more offensive to the people of our great state than to be sidelined in 2023 by a view of Alabama that is stuck in 1963,” he said in a statement. “This racial agenda is pressed by left-wing activists, not just in Alabama, but in any Republican state where it might advantage Democrats.”

And he compared the ruling, which aimed to empower Black voters, with Jim Crow.

“If this brazen and divisive commandeering is permitted without even a whisper of concern from other quarters, America’s congressional elections as we know them will never be the same,” Marshall continued. “We will be grouped together by race alone, with counties and cities split down the middle—the same way that we were so wrongfully segregated once before.”

Marshall also led a coalition of 18 GOP-led states that filed a 2021 amicus brief supporting Arizona’s defense of a law requiring voters who don’t sign their mail ballots to do so by 7 p.m. on election night.

The issue may seem minor, but Marshall’s brief invoked a far more fundamental question, arguing that state legislatures, not the courts, are in charge of setting election rules.

“The U.S. Constitution is unambiguous about the right of state legislatures to determine the manner of holding elections within their respective states,” wrote Marshall. “Accordingly, state legislatures, not federal courts, are vested with the legal authority to determine state election laws. Court attempts to micromanage election laws duly passed by state legislatures conflict with our constitutional structure and legal precedent.”

When North Carolina brought a version of this claim — known as the Independent State Legislature Theory — to the Supreme Court last year, experts warned that it could radically reshape election law, giving partisan state lawmakers almost unfettered power to make the rules. The Justices ultimately rejected the argument.

Why AGs enjoy influence

Advocates say it’s difficult to assess whether, and to what extent, courts are swayed by amicus briefs. But, they add, the role of state AGs as their state’s chief legal officer gives their claims an invaluable sheen of authority.

“State AGs are taken seriously because of the governmental role they play, in a way that parties, who do not have a governmental role, typically are not,” said Dax Goldstein, a senior counsel at States United Democracy Center. “So there’s a real difference between a sitting AG filing a brief and (Donald Trump lawyer) John Eastman filing a brief.”

In addition, since a 2007 Supreme Court ruling in a case where a group of states led by Massachusetts sued the George W. Bush administration’s Environmental Protection Agency, states have enjoyed more power than individual plaintiffs to bring lawsuits on public policy issues.

“States have a greater ability to bring legal challenges than private citizens do,” said Kistler. “So when you have these super active state officials with a greater ability to bring cases than private parties and a judiciary that’s willing to entertain the cases, it makes a difference.”

Nolette, the Marquette political scientist, noted that if the AGs’ series of briefs in election cases appear coordinated, it’s no accident.

“There’s a lot of strategy that goes into planning these far-reaching arguments,” Nolette said, adding that AGs of both parties use their partisan organizations — the Republican Attorney Generals Association, and the Democratic Attorney Generals Association — to align their efforts and figure out the venues where they might have the most chance of success.

“It’s almost like buying a lottery ticket, trying to boost the chances of those arguments taking hold somewhere,” Nolette continued. “And once they get one district court judge to agree with it, then it moves them to a different state of respectability. It’s like, well, a federal judge has agreed with us, so this is a legitimate argument, even if it was considered totally out there in previous years.”

Ralph Chapoco contributed to this report.

Fearing that Democrats hold a crucial edge in ballots cast before Election Day, national Republicans are working to convince their voters to take advantage of mail and early voting this year.?(Photo by Stephen Maturen/Getty Images)

Fearing that Democrats hold a crucial edge in ballots cast before Election Day, national Republicans are working to convince their voters to take advantage of mail and early voting this year.

“We can’t play catch up. We can’t start from behind. We can’t let Dems get a big head start and think we’re going to win it all on Election Day,” Republican National Committee chair Ronna McDaniel said in November on a conference call aimed at promoting the group’s Bank Your Vote initiative to encourage early and mail voting. “Things happen on Election Day.”

But the party’s army of lawyers is, more quietly, sending a very different message. The RNC is fighting in courtrooms and legal filings in key election battlegrounds across the country to make it harder to cast a mail ballot and to have it counted.

On Feb. 20, attorneys for the RNC were in a federal courtroom in Philadelphia, in a bid to require that Pennsylvania throw out mail ballots with missing or incorrect dates.

Eleven days earlier, they filed a lawsuit challenging several provisions of Arizona’s newly adopted election rules, including a rule allowing voters who have not shown proof of citizenship to cast a mail ballot.

And that same day, they asked a court in Georgia to uphold a state law that imposes stricter rules on mail voting.

Separately, in recent months the RNC has asked courts to let it join the defense of laws in Ohio, Wisconsin, and North Carolina that similarly impose tighter rules on mail voting (judges in the latter two states denied the requests, while the Ohio motion was approved).

The party also has sued to block a New York law that lets people vote by mail without an excuse (the state’s Supreme Court this month dismissed the complaint). And it has formally weighed in against proposed changes to Nevada’s election rules, including one that makes it easier for election officials to prevent volunteer observers from disrupting the counting of mail ballots.

In January, the RNC went further than ever, filing a lawsuit in Mississippi that it has said aims to obtain a nationwide ban on mail ballots that arrive after Election Day. RNC lawyers stated plainly in their complaint that Republicans’ interests are at stake because mail voting tends to favor Democrats.

States with close races targeted

Though it’s received relatively little attention, the RNC’s legal onslaught could have a major impact on the 2024 elections.

Pennsylvania, Georgia, Arizona, Wisconsin, North Carolina, and Nevada are all set to be among the closest states in this year’s presidential race, while Pennsylvania, Ohio, Arizona, Wisconsin, and Nevada host pivotal U.S. Senate contests. New York, meanwhile, is home to several swing congressional districts that could determine control of the U.S. House.

And the legal effort against mail voting has been matched by a legislative one. Thirteen states, including Florida, Texas, North Carolina, Arizona, and Ohio, have passed 16 bills to restrict mail voting since the start of 2023, according to a database run by the Voting Rights Lab.

It all amounts to a multi-pronged effort to suppress voting by mail, voting advocates say — one that could threaten access to the ballot this fall, especially for Democrats, who are now more likely than Republicans to use mail voting. At its core are legal arguments aimed at convincing judges to interpret the law in ways that are explicitly adverse to voters.

The push sits uneasily alongside an RNC campaign to convince GOP voters to embrace mail and early voting. But it’s right in keeping with former President Donald Trump’s years-long, evidence-free campaign against voting by mail.

“In courtrooms and state legislatures across the country, Republicans are doing everything in their power to restrict mail-in voting,” said Marc Elias, a prominent Democratic election lawyer, in a statement. “The RNC’s legal strategy is clear. The Republican Party no longer seeks to earn the support of a majority of the American electorate. Instead, they are launching a legal assault on our democracy.”

A spokesman for the RNC did not respond to a request for comment.

A muddled message on mail voting

In 2020, many states loosened rules on mail voting in response to COVID-19. That year’s election saw record high turnout despite the pandemic, with nearly half of all voters casting a mail ballot — a huge increase from around 22% in 2016.

Even with COVID-19 tamed, many states have kept their more liberal mail voting rules in place, or, like New York, have passed new laws expanding access to mail ballots.

While leading Democrats have embraced mail voting, Trump has repeatedly denounced it, falsely claiming it opens the door to massive fraud.

“MILLIONS OF MAIL-IN BALLOTS WILL BE PRINTED BY FOREIGN COUNTRIES,” Trump tweeted in June 2020, adding that the result would be a “RIGGED” election.

It’s true that several of the extremely rare instances of proven voter fraud have involved mail voting. But there’s no evidence of systematic mail voter fraud of the kind that Trump has claimed threatens the integrity of a presidential election.

A voter fraud database run by the Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank, lists 279 cases of “fraudulent use of absentee ballots,” going back to 1988 — since which time hundreds of millions of mail ballots have been cast.

Meanwhile, GOP lawyers have gone to the mat to try to put the mail voting genie back in the bottle.

“We’ve watched Democrats systematically try to codify those post-COVID changes that they made, and we’ve been in the courts trying to keep those pre-COVID protections in place for our elections,” RNC chair Ronna McDaniel explained in October. “There’s been a battle waged.”

It’s not surprising, then, that Democrats have in recent elections used mail voting at significantly higher rates than Republicans. So pronounced is the split that in 2020, President Joe Biden won the mail vote in 14 out of 15 states analyzed by 538.com, while Trump likewise won the Election Day vote in 14 out of 15.

That’s led the GOP to fret that it now often goes into Election Day already trailing by a significant margin. In response, the RNC last year launched the Bank Your Vote initiative to encourage Republicans to vote early or by mail.

The effort includes websites in all 50 states, and even an ad recorded by Trump — albeit without much visible enthusiasm.

“Sign up and commit to voting early,” Trump says. “We must defeat the far left at their own game.”

But Trump has continued to muddy that message.

“You know, we have these elections that last for 62 days,” Trump declared last month in his victory speech after the Iowa caucuses. “And if you need some more time, take as much time as you want. And so many bad things happen. We have to get rid of mail-in ballots because once you have mail-in ballots, you have crooked elections.”

RNC court filings

The RNC’s legal assault on mail voting suggests a similar view. In several court filings, RNC lawyers have suggested that tight safeguards are needed to ensure mail voting doesn’t allow for fraudulent votes.

Ohio’s law that restricts who can return a mail ballot on behalf of a voter should be upheld, the RNC argued in one typical filing, because it guards against “an increased risk of voter fraud and other irregularities.”

The Republican bid to restrict mail voting is part of a larger effort by the party since 2020 to devote more resources to “election integrity” — tighter election rules that prioritize anti-fraud measures over access. It includes a year-round election integrity legal department, which has said it worked with over 90 law firms and participated in nearly 100 lawsuits during the 2022 cycle.

So far this cycle, the RNC has paid over $4 million to two top Republican law firms, Consovoy McCarthy and Wiley Rein, according to FEC records. Thomas McCarthy, a co-founder of Consovoy McCarthy, is listed on RNC motions in the Mississippi, Georgia and Wisconsin cases, among others.

The focus on “election integrity” comes as McDaniel, the RNC chair, is reported to be stepping down at the end of the month. Trump’s choice to replace her, North Carolina GOP chair Michael Whatley, has stressed the importance of tight voting rules for Republican success, States Newsroom has reported.

Chipping away at mail votes

The most far-reaching of the RNC’s cases is the lawsuit it filed with other Republicans in January against a Mississippi law that allows mail ballots that arrive up to five days after an election to be counted, as long as they’re postmarked by Election Day.

Federal law sets Election Day as the Tuesday after the first Monday in November, the suit argues, so by extending the election past that day, Mississippi is violating federal law.

The RNC has said the goal is to obtain a ruling from a judge that bars post-Election-Day ballots from being counted not just in Mississippi but nationwide. The 5th Circuit, which contains Mississippi, is known as perhaps the most conservative judicial circuit in the country.

Election law experts have said it’s unlikely, but not impossible, that a court could accept the RNC’s argument.

If the case were to reach the Supreme Court, at least one justice appears friendly. In 2020, when the court upheld Wisconsin’s ban on late-arriving ballots, Justice Brett Kavanaugh wrote that states have the right to set election deadlines “to avoid the chaos and suspicions of impropriety that can ensue when thousands of absentee ballots flow in after election day and potentially flip the results of an election.”

Mississippi is one of 18 states — including key battlegrounds like Ohio, Nevada, Virginia, Texas, and New York — plus the District of Columbia, that count ballots that arrive after Election Day. (North Carolina last year passed a law that restricts mail voting in several ways, including by banning ballots that arrive after Election Day. It’s that law that the RNC sought unsuccessfully to help defend from a court challenge by Democrats, which is ongoing.)

The number of votes at issue could be significant. In 2020, the U.S. Postal Service said it processed nearly 190,000 ballots in the two days after the election. Most of those, it said, were in states that allow late-arriving ballots.

The Mississippi lawsuit makes clear that, despite the Bank Your Vote campaign, Republicans want to curtail mail voting because they think it gives Democrats an edge.

“Because voting by mail is starkly polarized by party, [allowing late-arriving ballots] directly harms Plaintiffs,” the RNC’s lawyers wrote in the complaint. “For example, according to the MIT Election Lab, 46% of Democratic voters in the 2022 General Election mailed in their ballots, compared to only 27% of Republicans. That means the late-arriving mail-in ballots that are counted for five additional days disproportionately break for Democrats.”

Pennsylvania case also crucial

The Pennsylvania case is another that could reverberate. In November 2022, the state Supreme Court ruled — in response to a suit filed by the RNC and other Republicans — that over 10,000 mail ballots on which the voter had neglected to write the date on the outer envelope, or had written an incorrect date, must be rejected.

The state’s NAACP chapter filed its own suit in federal court in response. The RNC quickly intervened, arguing that the state Supreme Court’s ruling should be upheld. A district court ruled for the NAACP in November, finding that the Civil Rights Act bars states from rejecting votes based on immaterial paperwork errors. The RNC appealed, arguing for a narrower interpretation of the landmark civil rights law, setting up the Feb. 20 hearing.

In a sign that the case could have an impact beyond Pennsylvania, 17 Republican-led states last month submitted an amicus brief in support of the RNC’s position.

The other cases may not have the same reach as those two. But together, they broadly aim to tighten the rules around mail voting to a degree that could significantly chip away at mail votes.

RNC lawyers have marshaled a range of arguments in these cases.

They have claimed, unsuccessfully, that New York’s law expanding access to mail voting violates the state’s constitution, which bans no-excuse mail voting. They’ve said Georgia’s new deadline to apply for a mail ballot of seven days before Election Day doesn’t violate the federal law barring deadlines of fewer than 11 days, because the federal government lacks the authority to regulate these deadlines.

No mail voting rule appears too small to escape the notice of RNC lawyers. This month’s lawsuit against Arizona targets a new rule that lets voters who registered without proof of citizenship — and therefore, under Arizona law, can vote in federal elections only — receive a mail ballot, arguing that state law bars these voters from voting by mail.

And they’ve submitted comments to a Nevada commission, criticizing a proposed rule there that gives election officials more power to ensure the counting process for mail ballots isn’t disrupted. The new powers could let election officials infringe on the public’s right to witness the counting, the group’s lawyers assert.

Meanwhile, supporters of mail voting say Republican fears about an influx of Democratic mail votes may be misplaced.

“Americans have used mail ballots for over a hundred years because they provide a safe and convenient way to ensure the right to vote,” said Barbara Smith Warner, the executive director of the National Vote at Home Institute, which advocates for mail voting. “Research has demonstrated time and time again that voting at home increases voter participation and turnout for all, with no partisan advantage for any side.”

“Attacks on mail ballots are red herrings to distract from their true intent — making it harder for citizens to vote, and sowing distrust in our elections,” Smith Warner said.

Former President Donald Trump, above, is backing Michael Whatley, the chair of the North Carolina GOP, to be the next Republican National Committee chair. (Photo by Scott Olson/Getty Images)

Former President Donald Trump’s choice to be the next chair of the national Republican Party briefly teamed up last election cycle with a voter fraud watchdog group closely tied to Cleta Mitchell, the conservative lawyer who played a key role in Trump’s bid to subvert the 2020 vote.

Trump is backing Michael Whatley, the chair of the North Carolina GOP, to be the next Republican National Committee chair, the New York Times reported Feb. 6. Ronna McDaniel, who currently holds the post, has told Trump she will step down later this month, according to the Times.

Whatley, a veteran GOP campaign operative who served in the administration of President George W. Bush, is reported to have won Trump’s support because he backs Trump’s baseless claim that the 2020 election was stolen through widespread voter fraud. Last year, Trump endorsed Whatley, who is currently the RNC’s general counsel, to be the organization’s co-chair.

Whatley spoke at a 2022 conference aimed at rooting out voter fraud and organized by the North Carolina Election Integrity Team, the group’s founder, Jim Womack, told States Newsroom.

“We brought them to our summit,” said Womack. “I gave Whatley an opportunity to address our people, and he talked about how it was going to be a great team effort.”

Around that time, Whatley also let Womack briefly plug NCEIT on a conference call of county chairs, said Womack, who chairs the Lee County GOP.

NCEIT is a chapter of the Election Integrity Network, which Mitchell founded in 2021 to train poll watchers to aggressively hunt for fraud at the polls. Womack has called Mitchell “our mentor.”

Mitchell, who is based in North Carolina, was closely involved in Trump’s efforts to overturn the result of the 2020 election, including participating in the December 2020 phone call on which Trump urged Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger to “find” the votes he needed to win the state.

A special grand jury in Fulton County, Georgia recommended indicting Mitchell, but she was not charged.

The North Carolina Republican Party declined to comment about Whatley’s work with NCEIT.

Womack, who ran unsuccessfully against Whatley for state party chair in 2019, said that after Whatley’s appearance at the summit, the relationship fizzled, as Whatley kept NCEIT at arm’s length from the state party.

Womack said the party under Whatley discouraged Republican volunteers from getting involved with NCEIT.

“They were telling a lot of the counties, don’t use their reporting system, don’t go to their training, go to our training,” said Womack.

Indeed, Womack complained that Whatley hadn’t gone far enough in fighting against fraud.

Still, under Whatley, the state party in 2021 unveiled a 16-member “Election Integrity Committee” to push for tighter voting rules and recruit poll watchers.

At a conference that year hosted by the conservative group CPAC, Whatley suggested that if it wasn’t for the party’s election integrity legal work, Democrats would have stolen a 2020 election for state Supreme Court that was won by the Republican candidate by 401 votes.

“You can’t tell me in 100 North Carolina counties, they couldn’t have come up with four votes (in each) if I didn’t have lawyers and attorneys in every single one of those counties,” Whatley said.

“This is gonna have to be part of the Republican establishment going forward,” Whatley added, referring to intensified legal efforts. “This is going to be lawsuit after lawsuit after lawsuit.”

A growing share of Americans appears willing, in our ultra-polarized times, to put partisan or ideological loyalties ahead of democracy, a review of polls, focus groups and other analyses shows. (Stephen Maturen/Getty Images)

With former President Donald Trump having all but wrapped up the GOP presidential nomination, one issue looks set to be at the center of the general election campaign: the threat to democracy.

In a major campaign speech in Pennsylvania in January, President Joe Biden detailed Trump’s lies about the 2020 election, his efforts to use violence to hold on to power, and his promises of “revenge” and “retribution” against political enemies.

“Trump’s assault on democracy isn’t just part of his past,” Biden declared. “It’s what he’s promising for the future.”

To combat the charge, Team Trump has sought to muddy the waters by claiming, without evidence, that in fact it’s the president who threatens democracy. Trump says the criminal indictments in four cases brought against him are the proof — though there’s no evidence that Biden influenced prosecutors in any of them. Trump also points to a case pending before the Supreme Court, in which Biden also has no involvement, that would rule Trump ineligible for the ballot.

“They’ve weaponized government, and he’s saying I’m a threat to democracy,” Trump said at an Iowa rally last month, accusing Biden of “pathetic fearmongering.”

All of which brings up a question: How do ordinary Americans regard democracy? Some people might assume that, though voters are deeply divided over just about everything, there is agreement on democracy as the way to resolve differences.

And yet, nearly half the electorate say they plan to vote for a candidate who already has gravely undermined democracy, and promises to do so again if reelected. Does that suggest Americans’ commitment to democracy — not just to holding elections, but to the norms that undergird liberal democracy, like the rule of law and an impartial justice system — isn’t as ironclad as we’d like to think?

Recently, a trove of information has emerged to shed light on the question. A series of polls, surveys, focus groups, and other analyses — many released since the start of the year — has aimed to gauge Americans’ views on democracy: how important it is, how well it’s working, and whether there are times when democratic values should be jettisoned.

The findings are varied and not easy to summarize, but a few themes stand out: Dissatisfaction with how democracy is performing is sky-high across the political spectrum. Large majorities say democracy is at risk. And, perhaps most importantly: A growing share of Americans appears willing, in our ultra-polarized times, to put partisan or ideological loyalties ahead of democracy.

“When you are living in a more polarized time, it is going to be more likely that people are going to find excuses for their principles to be pushed to the side, because in that moment their political identity is more important than almost any other identity,” said Joe Goldman, the president of the Democracy Fund, a pro-democracy advocacy organization, and a co-author of a long-term study released this month by the group on Americans’ views of democracy.

That’s a highly dangerous situation, democracy advocates say. A clear and cross-partisan pro-democracy consensus among the public could act as a crucial bulwark against the kind of authoritarian steps that Trump has said he’ll take if re-elected — and could make it harder for him to win in the first place. Without that consensus, the threat to democracy will continue to grow.

Questioning of democracy

Going back to the founding, there’s been a strain of thinking that distrusted democracy as a system that can lead to mob rule and tyranny.

“It’s pretty clear that our founders hated democracy,” said Michael Schudson, a professor at Columbia Journalism School, who has studied the history of American civic life. “They were trying to get away from it. Democracy was a form of government from the past that led to, essentially, anarchy.”

Even today, many leading conservatives insist on calling the U.S. not a democracy but a republic.

“By the way, the United States is not a democracy,” Rep. Mike Johnson, R-La., now the House speaker, said in a 2019 church sermon. “Do you know what a democracy is? Two wolves and a sheep deciding what’s for dinner. You don’t want to be in a democracy. Majority rule: not always a good thing.”

But there’s no question that recent years have seen a rise in the number of Americans who say democracy isn’t working well — or even who question it as a system and express support for alternatives.

A Jan. 10 analysis by the University of Virginia’s Center for Politics, which summarized results from seven high-quality recent polls, found broad agreement that “American democracy is not working.”

One typical poll included in the UVA analysis, released this month by Gallup, found just 28% of respondents, a new low, said they were satisfied with how democracy is functioning.

An overwhelming number of respondents to a PRRI survey from last year — 84% of Democrats, 77% of Republicans, and 73% of independents — said that U.S. democracy is at risk. And 2 out of 3 respondents to a Jan. 31 Quinnipiac poll said U.S. democracy is in danger of collapse.

Challenges for Democrats

A set of focus group conversations with mostly undecided voters in Georgia, Wisconsin and Nevada, conducted Jan. 24 by the progressive polling firm Navigator Research and viewed by States Newsroom, found similar views. But the focus groups also underscored the challenges that Democrats might have in convincing voters that Trump is to blame for democracy’s troubles.

Participants almost universally said, when asked, that U.S. democracy is not working well. One Nevada man described it as a corpse, an assessment that many other participants appeared to agree with.

But asked why, almost no one pointed to Trump and his lies about the 2020 election, his role in the violence of Jan. 6, or his promises to govern as an authoritarian. Many participants, instead, talked about feeling that their vote doesn’t matter because politicians on both sides ignore the views of regular people — concerns that existed long before the tumult of the Trump era.

“It’s self-interest on both sides,” said a Georgia woman. “From the lobbyists, from the politicians, to make it the way they want instead of the way we want.”

“Both sides are trying to say (democracy is under attack), but they’re trying to just point at the other side and make everyone believe it’s the other side,” said a Wisconsin man. “I tend to think it’s more about the entities that are in power just wanting to remain in power. And that’s the best way to do that, is to make sure that we think it is under attack, but from the other side.”

The Stony Brook University political scientist Stanley Feldman summed up the challenge in an interview with the New York Times.

“Voting to protect democracy isn’t as straightforward as it may seem. Democracy is an abstraction to many voters,” said Feldman. “To many Republicans, bringing criminal charges against Trump at this point looks like the Biden administration is trying to subvert democracy by getting rid of a candidate who can win in November.”

‘Preserving democracy’ still seems urgent

Still, at least in the abstract, people appear to value democracy and to see preserving it as important.

When the Quinnipiac poll asked people to choose which of 10 issues was the most urgent, the top choice, at 24%, was “preserving democracy”. Over 80 percent of participants in the Democracy Fund study, who were surveyed at different times from 2017 to 2022, said democracy is a fairly or very good political system. And only 8 percent were found to be “consistently authoritarian” in their responses.

But when Democracy Fund asked a series of questions aimed at gauging support for key tenets of liberal democracy — including about authoritarian rule, about using violence to advance political goals, and about accepting election results — only 27% always gave the pro-democracy answer.

Perhaps even more troubling, this willingness to deprioritize democracy corresponded closely to partisan interests. For instance, in September 2020, 81% of Republicans said it would be important for the loser of that year’s election to acknowledge the winner. In November — the month when the election was called for Biden, and Trump refused to concede defeat — that figure was 31%.

“The results show that support for foundational principles of liberal democracy are discouragingly soft and inconsistent,” the study’s authors conclude, adding: “There is a significant segment of the population that may be willing to embrace or accept the cause of authoritarian figures if and when it is in their partisan and political interests.”

Plenty of other polling evidence points toward the same conclusion. A CNN poll from October found that 67% of likely Republican primary voters in South Carolina said Trump’s efforts to overturn the election, if true, are not relevant to his fitness for the presidency.

An AP/NORC poll released in December found that 87% of Democrats said a Trump win in 2024 would damage democracy, while 82% of Republicans said the same thing about a Biden win.

And a University of Virginia poll released in October found that 41% of Biden supporters and 38% of Trump supporters said the other side is so extreme that it’s OK to use violence to stop them. The same poll found that 31% of Trump supporters and 24% of Biden supporters thought the U.S. should explore non-democratic forms of government.

“Support for various aspects of liberal democracy has always been spongier than we’d like to think,” said Lee Drutman, a senior fellow at the New America think tank and a co-author of the Democracy Fund report. “But what’s distinct to this moment is that one party has elevated leaders that show no restraint and no respect for these foundational aspects of liberal democracy.”

“(So) you have people who are willing to tolerate tremendous incursions on the foundations of democracy as long as it’s their side that’s doing it,” Drutman continued, “and you have a party with leaders who are willing to take advantage.”

How to reduce polarization

There are some reasons for hope. Last June, a Stanford University project convened a nationally representative sample of 600 registered voters of all political stripes for lengthy deliberative conversations, in groups of 10, on issues affecting U.S. democracy, including voter access, election administration, and campaign finance.

The organizers consistently found that the conversations led participants to become less polarized across partisan lines in their opinions, with Republicans moving towards Democrats and vice versa.

For instance, only 30% of Republicans started out supporting the idea of letting people register to vote online. But after the conversations, a majority joined most Democrats in backing the idea.

Conversely, only 44% of Democrats started out liking the idea of requiring audits of a random sample of ballots to ensure that votes are counted accurately. After the conversations, 58% joined most Republicans in support.

Views even on seemingly more controversial ideas like having nonpartisan officials, not partisan lawmakers, draw district lines, or restoring voting rights to ex-felons, changed dramatically, especially among Republicans, said James Fishkin, a Stanford political scientist who helped organize the conversations.

Fishkin said the results suggest to him that once the campaign focuses more squarely on the threat to democracy, voters will start to grasp the need to protect it.

“The norms that make democracy work do matter to people, and the idea that democracy might come to an end is such an awesome threat that people haven’t really thought about it,” said Fishkin. ‘They’re thinking about inflation and the so-called crisis at the border, they’re not thinking about the end of democracy as we know it. I think once the public focuses on it, you may well get a different answer.”

But to Drutman, the threat will persist as long as the nation remains hyper-polarized, with one party willing to trample democratic norms.

“One argument is that there is an anti-MAGA majority out there of people who are committed enough to democracy that some small sliver of the electorate will continue to elect Democrats,” Drutman said. “But democracy can’t fundamentally depend on one party winning forever.”

Ranked choice voting, which asks voters to rank multiple candidates in order of preference, has seen its profile steadily expand since 2016.?(Photo by Bill Pugliano/Getty Images)

With U.S. democracy plagued by extremism, polarization, and a growing disconnect between voters and lawmakers, a set of reforms that could dramatically upend how Americans vote is gaining momentum at surprising speed in Western states.

Ranked choice voting, which asks voters to rank multiple candidates in order of preference, has seen its profile steadily expand since 2016, when Maine became the first state to adopt it. But increasingly, RCV is being paired with a new system for primaries known as Final Five — or in some cases, Final Four — that advances multiple candidates, regardless of party, to the general election.

Together, proponents argue, these twin reforms deliver fairer outcomes that better reflect the will of voters, while disempowering the extremes and encouraging candidates and elected officials to prioritize conciliation and compromise.

Ultimately, they say, the new system can help create a government focused not on partisan point-scoring but on delivering tangible results that improve voters’ lives.

Alaska, the only state currently using RCV-plus-Final Four or Final-Five, appears to be seeing some benefits to its political culture already: After years of partisan rancor, both legislative chambers are now controlled by bipartisan majorities eager to find common ground and respond to the needs of voters, say lawmakers in the state who have embraced the new system.

A slew of other states could soon follow in Alaska’s footsteps. Last year, Nevada voters approved a constitutional amendment that would create an RCV-plus-Final-Five system — for the measure to take effect, voters must approve it again next year.

Efforts also are underway to get RCV-plus-Final-Five on Arizona’s 2024 ballot, and RCV-plus-Final-Four in Colorado and Idaho — where organizers announced Wednesday that they’ve gathered 50,000 signatures (they need around 63,000 to qualify). Even Wisconsin Republicans, who in the redistricting sphere have fought reform efforts tooth and nail, in December held a hearing for bipartisan legislation that would create RCV-plus-Final-Five, though its prospects appear dim.

Meanwhile, Oregon voters will decide next year whether to adopt RCV alone. And this year, Minnesota and Illinois lawmakers passed bills to study RCV, while Connecticut approved a measure that allows local governments to use it.

There are even flickers of interest at the national level. In December alone, two leading Washington, D.C. think tanks that often find themselves on opposite sides — the conservative American Enterprise Institute and the liberal Center for American Progress — each held separate panel discussions that considered RCV-plus-Final-Four/Five.

Katherine Gehl, the founder of the Institute for Political Innovation, and the designer of the Final Four/Five system, calls RCV-plus-Final-Five “transformational.” (Her organization now says advancing five candidates to the general works best, by giving voters more choices.)

“There’s a huge pressure on reformers to say, this is not a silver bullet,” said Gehl. “And OK, I get that.”

But, she added, “I think it’s as close to a silver bullet as you can come.”

Meanwhile, a backlash to reform is brewing, with several Republican-led states banning RCV in recent years. A coalition of national conservative election groups last month warned Wisconsin’s legislative leaders that RCV and Final Five are “intended to dramatically push our politics to the Left.”

Understanding the process

Here’s how RCV-plus-Final-Four/Five works.

In the primary election, candidates from all parties compete against each other, with voters picking only their top choice, as in a conventional election. The top four or five finishers, regardless of party, advance to the general.

In the general, voters use RCV to pick the winner. They fill out their ballot by ranking as many of the candidates as they want, by order of preference.

If no candidate wins a majority of first-place votes, the candidate who finished last is eliminated, and his or her supporters’ second-place votes are allocated. If there’s still no candidate with a majority, the process is repeated with the next-to-last candidate. This continues until someone gains a majority and is declared the winner.

Supporters of the system say the Final Four/Five primary gives a voice to a broader share of voters, while the use of RCV in the general helps ensure a fairer result. Under the current system, two similar candidates together may win a clear majority but split voters between them, allowing a third candidate to win with a minority of votes.

But even more important, many advocates argue, is how the two reforms together can change how candidates and elected officials of all stripes approach their jobs, by adjusting the incentive structure they operate under.

Increasingly, many states and districts are solidly red or blue, meaning the general election is uncompetitive, and the key race takes place in the primary. That’s a problem, because the primary electorate is by and large smaller, more partisan and more extreme than the general electorate.

Right now, with politicians worrying more about the primary than the general, they’re more focused on playing to their base than on reaching beyond it and solving problems, critics argue. It isn’t hard to find evidence for this lately, both in Washington and in state capitals across the country.

By allowing multiple candidates to advance, Final Four/Five shifts the crucial election from the primary to the general. And RCV means the votes of Democrats in red districts and Republicans in blue ones still matter, even if their top choice remains unlikely to win.

Together, it means candidates are rewarded for paying attention to the entire general electorate, not just a small slice of staunch supporters. As a result, it encourages candidates — and elected officials, once in office — toward moderation and problem-solving, and away from extremism.

“People do what it takes to get and keep their jobs,” said Gehl, the Final Four/Five designer. “So if you change who hires and fires, which is to say, November voters instead of primary voters, and you change the system so that there’s real competition in November every time, even once you’re an incumbent, that forces accountability.”

A success story from the Last Frontier?

The experience of Alaska, whose voters passed an RCV-plus-Final-Four system in 2020, offers an illustration.

At its first use in 2022, U.S. Sen. Lisa Murkowski, an independent-minded Republican distrusted by the party’s conservative wing, was reelected. Mary Peltola, a moderate Democrat who kept in place her Republican predecessor’s chief of staff, was elected to the U.S. House, defeating Sarah Palin, the conservative Republican former governor. (Murkowski and Peltola endorsed each other).

Meanwhile, voters reelected Gov. Mike Dunleavy, a conservative Republican – suggesting, reformers say, that the system can produce a wide range of outcomes.

And more women ran in 2022 than in the five previous cycles combined — highlighting how allowing anyone to run, regardless of party, can boost opportunities for under-represented groups.

But the effect on how candidates and lawmakers have approached their jobs has been more dramatic still, advocates say.

Senate Majority Leader Cathy Giessel, a Republican, told the Center for American Progress event that, after angering GOP voters by working collaboratively with Democrats, she lost her 2020 primary, held under the old election system, to a staunch conservative. Giessel had been in office since 2011.

Giessel said that when she ran again last year under RCV-plus-Final-Four, her campaign didn’t even buy the database showing voters’ party affiliations that most candidates rely on to identify supporters, because she needed to target voters of all stripes. Helped by being the second choice of many Democratic voters in the general election, Giessel won back her seat.

“You’re requiring us as candidates to be much more authentic,” said Giessel of the new system. “We’re not speaking to a party platform anymore. We’re speaking to the citizens.”

Giessel now leads a bipartisan majority coalition, formed within days of the election. Members have focused on consensus issues that are priorities for voters, including boosting education funding, lowering the cost of energy and passing a balanced budget.

“We have seen much more collaboration on the budget,” said Giessel. “There’s a much more open process now, understanding that everyone needs to have input.“

An analysis by the R Street Institute, a center-right Washington, D.C. think tank, found that Alaska’s new election system “gave citizens greater choice and elevated the most broadly appealing candidates, in turn improving representation.”

Reformers in Nevada — gearing up for next year’s campaign to pass RCV-plus-Final-Five a second time after it won with 53% of the vote last year — have noticed Alaska’s early success.

Over 40% of all registered voters in the Silver State aren’t affiliated with a major party, and the figure is growing. It was these voters’ frustration over being denied a voice in the state’s taxpayer-funded closed primaries that initially drove the push for reform, said Mike Draper, the communications director for Nevada Voters First, a political action committee that organized the ballot measure.

As in Alaska and elsewhere, there was also a related concern about politicians playing only to their base.

“Candidates and electeds, through no fault of their own, are not incentivized to … work to solve problems,” said Draper. “The primary incentive is to make sure they stay in the good graces either of the party, or of that fringe group that’s active in the primaries.”

Top figures in both major parties, including Nevada’s Republican governor and its two Democratic U.S. senators, oppose reform. A lawsuit brought by Democratic super-lawyer Marc Elias that aimed to keep the measure off the 2022 ballot was rejected by a judge.

‘A scheme of the Left’?

Though elected Democrats in Nevada and some other blue states have come out against reform, the most vocal opponents have been red-state Republicans and national conservative groups. They argue it would confuse voters and further reduce confidence in election results.

Some even see a progressive plot. An October analysis by the conservative Foundation for Government Accountability called RCV a “scheme of the Left to disenfranchise voters and elect more Democrats.”

Florida, Tennessee, Idaho, Montana, and South Dakota — all Republican-controlled states — have passed legislation in recent years to ban RCV. Arizona’s GOP-controlled legislature also passed an RCV ban, but it was vetoed by Gov. Katie Hobbs, a Democrat.

In Alaska, conservatives have launched a campaign to advance a ballot measure repealing their state’s reform. Palin, who has blamed the system for her loss to Peltola last year, calling it “wack,” is playing a prominent role in the effort.

Still, advocates say there are also signs of emerging interest among some Republicans in other states.

Last year, the GOP lost several winnable statewide races after primary voters nominated extremists like Doug Mastriano in Pennsylvania and Kari Lake in Arizona. Now, some in the party think reform could allow them to advance more electable candidates.

“Even among Republicans, I’ve had my fair share of conversations where they are starting to recognize that the system isn’t putting forward candidates who are necessarily the best general election winners,” said Matt Germer, an associate director and elections fellow at the R Street Institute.

“So there’s even some growing interest among Republican electeds to say, hey, what we’re doing now is not growing our party. And if we really want to change our country, we’re going to need to grow our party, and that means appealing to enough voters to win elections.”

Mike Johnson (Anna Moneymaker/Getty Images)

Back in July, Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas testified before the U.S. House Judiciary Committee.

A federal court had recently granted a temporary injunction, in Missouri v. Biden, finding that the Biden administration had violated the First Amendment by coercing social media companies to remove content, related both to elections and the COVID-19 vaccine, that it deemed false and harmful.

The ruling is being appealed to the Supreme Court, which last month temporarily blocked the order. But one committee member wanted to press the advantage.

“What is disinformation?” asked Rep. Mike Johnson, R-La.

“Disinformation is inaccurate information…” Mayorkas began.

“Who determines what’s inaccurate?” Johnson interjected almost immediately. “Who determines what’s false? You understand the problem here?”

Moments later, Mayorkas testified that the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, a unit of DHS whose activities were part of the case, focuses on fighting disinformation from foreign adversaries — speech that would likely enjoy fewer First Amendment protections than speech by Americans.

But Johnson was ready.

“No, sir,” Johnson said. “The court determined you and all of your cohorts made no distinction between domestic speech and foreign speech. So don’t stand there under oath and tell me that you only focused on … foreign actors. That’s not true.”

“I so, so, regret that I’m out of time,” Johnson concluded.

Johnson’s forceful performance lit up right-wing media, burnishing his credentials as a conservative stalwart and a fiercely effective Republican partisan.

This was hardly the first time that Johnson had put the Biden administration on the defensive over its efforts to fight online disinformation — false or misleading information that is deliberately spread to advance a political or ideological goal. In fact, in recent years, there appear to have been few national issues on which Johnson, who in October was elected by the GOP as speaker of the House, has played a more prominent role.

Johnson’s efforts have largely succeeded. Since 2020, the federal government and social media companies have scaled back their work to counter online disinformation — thanks in part, experts say, to the furious pushback from Johnson and other leading Republicans.

Disinformation specialists increasingly worry that voters in next year’s election may have to contend with a barrage of lies flowing freely online.

“It’s going to be a wild ride,” said Sam Wineburg, a professor at the Stanford Graduate School of Education, who studies how people respond to disinformation. “We are going to see a deluge of misinformation and … a great deal of confusion online.”

A spokesman for the speaker’s office did not respond to a request for comment on the growing concerns about election-related disinformation.

Pulling back on countering disinformation

In 2020, amid a flurry of online lies about both the COVID-19 pandemic and the presidential election, social media companies stepped up their efforts to curb disinformation, including labeling some of President Donald Trump’s tweets as misleading.

These initiatives, especially the platforms’ work to limit the spread of stories about Hunter Biden’s laptop in the election’s final weeks, spurred a backlash from conservatives. Though information from the laptop hasn’t been shown to significantly implicate President Joe Biden, the authenticity of the laptop itself has since been confirmed

The ensuing pressure campaign by congressional Republicans like Johnson, decrying what they call censorship and collusion by government and Big Tech, has led both the Biden administration and the platforms themselves to rein in their efforts to protect voters from disinformation.

Last year, DHS announced the Disinformation Governance Board, charged with coordinating efforts to identify and counter online disinformation. Weeks later, after a fierce Republican backlash, it shuttered the panel.

CISA, the DHS agency about which Johnson grilled Mayorkas in July, has stopped reaching out to social media companies to share information, NBC News recently reported. The same outlet also reported that the FBI recently put an indefinite hold on most briefings to social media companies about Russian, Iranian and Chinese influence campaigns. The bureau’s interactions with the platforms now must be pre-approved by government lawyers.

Another DHS program, Rumor Control, which provided quick responses to election disinformation on election night and beforehand, also appears to be on the wane, NPR reported.

The government’s retreat has upped the onus on social media companies to proactively monitor disinformation. But these efforts, too, are set to be less robust in 2024 than they were in 2020, after layoffs have reduced staffing on trust and safety teams.

Last year, Meta loosened constraints on political advertising to allow ads on Facebook and Instagram that question the legitimacy of the 2020 election, the Wall Street Journal recently reported. And X owner Elon Musk announced recently that he has eliminated the site’s elections integrity team, claiming it was “undermining election integrity.”

Experts suggest the more hands-off approach from the platforms is in part a response to the Republican outrage, which has left tech leaders reluctant to alienate powerful figures who may expand their control of the federal government just over a year from now.

“The platform leadership often felt that 2020 put them in a horrible position for potentially what the next administration might look like,” said Tim Harper, who runs the Elections and Democracy program at the Center for Democracy and Technology, which advocates for tech policies that promote democracy. “And so they’re a little bit more wary of what the political implications could be after the 2024 election.”

Meanwhile, technological advances, especially those involving generative AI, have made online disinformation much more sophisticated and harder to see through than in past elections.

“Think about where we were in 2016 and 2020,” said Wineburg, the Stanford disinformation expert. “The St. Petersburg labs spewing disinformation, often with spellings and tortured grammar — that’s gone. Just plug it into an LLM (a Large Language Model — an AI-driven algorithm that can convincingly generate human language text) and it’s going to look like it’s not only by a native speaker, but a native speaker who understands proper grammar.”

Johnson warned of ‘censorship industrial complex’

Since his ascension to the speaker job last month, Johnson’s leading role in the Republican pushback has received little attention. But, over the last year-and-a-half, he has used congressional hearings, legislation, and conservative media appearances to relentlessly warn about the dangers of what he has called the “censorship industrial complex.”

When Mayorkas announced the creation of the Disinformation Governance Board in April 2022, it was described as a working group with no operational authority. But conservatives were quick to paint it as an Orwellian scheme to censor political speech.

The far-right influencer Jack Posobiec, who has 1.7 million followers on X, called the panel a “Ministry of Truth” — language soon picked up by Johnson and other congressional Republicans.

“The Biden Administration’s decision to stand up a ‘Ministry of Truth,’ is dystopian in design, almost certainly unconstitutional, and clearly doomed from the start,” Johnson said in a press release announcing legislation he was introducing to defund the board. “The government has no role whatsoever in determining what constitutes truth or acceptable speech.”

A week later, in a sign that Republicans recognized the benefits of highlighting the issue, then-Speaker Kevin McCarthy introduced his own version of Johnson’s bill, with Johnson as a co-sponsor.

Johnson and other Republicans also seized on the news that the board would be run by Nina Jankowicz, a disinformation scholar. They accused Jankowicz of calling the Hunter Biden laptop a Russian influence op.

“She’s supposed to be in charge of determining what is true and what is acceptable speech, and it’s just outrageous,” Johnson told Newsmax.

In fact, Jankowicz, while live-tweeting a 2020 presidential debate, had noted that Biden referred to a letter by former national security leaders stating their belief that the laptop was a Russian influence op. In the runup to the election, however, Jankowicz did elsewhere cast doubt on the laptop’s authenticity.

Jankowicz was targeted with abuse and death threats, and within weeks she had resigned. When, not long after, the board was shuttered entirely, it was perhaps Republicans’ most concrete victory on the issue.

But Johnson hasn’t let the subject drop. In March, he appeared on Fox News to discuss a subpoena issued to Jankowicz by a newly formed House subcommittee on weaponization of the federal government, chaired by Ohio Republican Rep. Jim Jordan, to which Johnson had been named.

“We have a lot of questions about the foundation of (the disinformation board),” Johnson said. “How were they going to determine what is so-called disinformation? What were they going to do with this? It’s pretty scary. We have to make sure that this never ever happens again.”

Later that same month, the subcommittee held a hearing aimed at promoting Missouri v. Biden, the lawsuit filed by Republican attorneys general in Missouri and Louisiana that challenged the Biden administration’s efforts to work with social media companies to control disinformation.

“The executive branch has undertaken a broad campaign to censor the American people,” Johnson declared. “That’s the headline. That’s the takeaway today.”

In May, at another hearing of the Select Subcommittee on the Weaponization of Government, this one focused on the FBI, Johnson said the bureau “worked with the social media platforms hand in hand, almost as partners over the last two election cycles, to censor and silence conservatives online that they disagreed with.”

At yet another hearing In July, not long after the federal court ruling that the bureau and other agencies had violated the First Amendment, Johnson grilled FBI director Christopher Wray.

Like Mayorkas, Wray said his agency focused on disinformation from foreign adversaries.

“That’s not accurate,” Johnson jumped in. “You need to read this court opinion because you’re in charge of enforcing it … (It) wasn’t just foreign adversaries, sir, it was American citizens. How do you answer for this?”

That same month, Johnson teamed up with Jordan and Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky., to introduce more legislation on the subject. The Free Speech Protection Act would bar executive branch employees from censoring protected speech and impose “mandatory severe penalties” on executive branch employees who censor protected speech. The bill has not advanced in the House.

“The dystopian scheme by the government, Big Tech, academia, and many NGOs to censor American citizens and silence conservative voices is far-reaching and dangerous,” said Johnson.

The outrage generated by Johnson and his colleagues has had an impact. As? the 2024 election looms, experts say, those looking to undermine elections by using false information to confuse voters online are in a stronger position than ever — not least because they will have had four more years to perfect their craft.

“There are people who are highly incentivized to harm our democracy by raising doubt about elections, and they have been actively organizing and raising money over the last three years,” David Becker, the founder and executive director for the Center on Election Innovation and Research, which works with election officials to improve election administration and build voter trust, recently told States Newsroom. “In 2020, those that were trying to undermine that election were largely making it up as they went along with crazy legal theories and chasing bizarre pieces of disinformation. They are going to be better prepared.”

This report has been corrected to more accurately reflect the nature of Nina Jankowicz’s public comments about the Hunter Biden laptop.

Attendees react to early election results at an election night party on Nov. 7, 2023 in Columbus, Ohio. The results of this year’s state and local contests, advocates say, could make future elections, including the 2024 presidential contest, freer and fairer.?(Photo by Graham Stokes for Ohio Capital Journal)

The big news out of Tuesday’s elections was wins for Democrats and for reproductive rights in Ohio, Virginia, Kentucky and Pennsylvania.

But small “d” democracy also had a good night:

• Virginians elected pro-voting majorities in both chambers, stymieing efforts to pass restrictive new voting laws.
• Ohioans turned out in large numbers to pass two popular ballot measures, showing direct democracy is alive and well despite a concerted campaign in the state to restrict it.
• Pennsylvanians rejected a state Supreme Court candidate who has baselessly stoked fear about voter fraud.
• Two top Kentucky officials who have offered a model of how to work across party lines to expand voter access were both easily reelected.
• And five cities supported a fast-growing democratic reform aimed at producing outcomes that better reflect voter preferences.

The result, advocates say, could be to make future elections, including the 2024 presidential contest, freer and fairer.

“Americans sent a clear message that they reject MAGA extremism and want leaders who will stand up for our fundamental freedoms and our democracy,” said Christina Harvey, executive director of Stand Up America, a progressive pro-democracy group. “Together with last year’s wins in secretary of state races across the country, these victories help build a firewall for democracy in 2024.”

Virginia

Virginia Republicans last year passed bills through the House of Delegates to ban ballot drop-boxes and end same-day voter registration. Had they won control of the Senate Tuesday, those measures could very well have become law — and they could have significantly hampered voter access.

Instead, Democrats held the Senate and even flipped the House, ensuring that anti-voter legislation in the state is dead.

The competitive races for both houses also demonstrated the success of the redistricting reforms approved by the state in December 2021, advocates said, after a Republican gerrymander had been in place for a decade.

“Fair maps are essential to a functioning democracy, and they are critical in this moment to beat back … attempts to roll back voters’ fundamental rights,” former Attorney General Eric Holder, the chairman of the National Democratic Redistricting Committee, said in a statement.

Ohio

Ohio’s results were good news for democracy for a different reason.

Republicans in the state had worked to restrict and complicate Ohio’s ballot initiative process, aiming to make it harder for voters to pass popular measures, including abortion protections. It was part of a national effort to create obstacles to popular democracy.

First, Ohio Republicans put an initiative on the ballot that would have raised the threshold required to pass ballot measures to 60%. Voters overwhelmingly rejected that in August.

Then state officials approved what reproductive rights supporters called misleading and biased language for the abortion measure’s ballot summary, which told voters that the amendment would “always allow an unborn child to be aborted.”

Nonetheless, voters approved the measure, as well as another ballot initiative legalizing marijuana. In doing so, they made clear that Ohio’s process for allowing its citizens to directly pass laws and amend the state constitution — which has often allowed for the passage of popular reforms that lawmakers had kept bottled up — remains viable and robust.

Nearly 4 million voters turned out in an odd-numbered year — nearly as many as in last year’s midterms, when governor and U.S. Senate races were on the ballot.

Ohio’s legislative leaders have limited power to weaken or undo the abortion rights measure because it’s a constitutional amendment. Still, they said they were willing to go against the will of voters to try.

“The legislature has multiple paths that we will explore to continue to protect innocent life,” said House Speaker Jason Stephens.

Despite the high turnout, voter advocates said there were a few signs of problems caused by a new voting law that stiffened ID requirements and put new restrictions on mail voting.

They said poll monitors at Ohio State University in Columbus reported many students saying they hadn’t received their mail ballot in time, and were forced to vote provisionally. And, advocates said, many voters, especially students, didn’t know that their ballots needed to be physically postmarked — not just dropped in a mailbox — by the day before Election Day.

Pennsylvania

Meanwhile, Pennsylvanians helped boost the prospects for future fair elections. They elected Democrat Daniel McCaffery to the state Supreme Court, rejecting Republican Carolyn Carluccio.

On the campaign trail earlier this year, Carluccio stoked unfounded fears about widespread fraud.

“We should be able to go to the polls and understand that our vote counts and understand that there’s not going to be some hanky-panky going on in the back,” she said.

Carluccio also said she would “welcome” a challenge to a Pennsylvania law that expanded mail voting, adding that the measure has been “very bad for our commonwealth.”

Ahead of the 2022 midterms, Pennsylvania’s Supreme Court ruled that mail ballots with missing or incorrect dates could be rejected. Carluccio’s defeat, which gives Democrats a 5-2 majority on the court, makes it less likely that it will issue similar anti-voter rulings next year, in what’s likely to be a pivotal state.

McCaffery has said he supports efforts to increase participation, and that he backs a 2018 Supreme Court decision striking down the state’s gerrymander.

Kentucky

In Kentucky, Gov. Andy Beshear and Secretary of State Michael Adams were both easily reelected. Beshear, a Democrat, and Adams, a Republican, worked closely together in 2020 to ensure an accessible election in the face of the pandemic.

Then in 2021, they teamed up to convince the GOP-controlled legislature to make some of those changes permanent, creating early-voting centers and expanding the period for mail voting.

“I do think it was good overall for public confidence in the election to have a D and an R at the table together working it out, appearing jointly at press conferences, because that meant that it was unlikely that one side would claim the other side was going to rig the rules,” Adams said recently. “The Democrats saw the governor, and the Republicans saw me. And so, both sides thought, ‘Well, this must be fair because my guy’s at the table, right?’”

Local elections

Finally, a democratic reform that backers say leads to fairer elections also fared well. Voters in three Michigan cities — Kalamazoo, East Lansing, and Royal Oak — approved the use of ranked choice voting for their elections. Meanwhile, Minnetonka, Minnesota, voted to keep RCV, while Easthampton, Massachusetts, voted to expand it.

RCV, which has been adopted by Maine, Alaska, and Nevada, as well as numerous local governments, allows voters to rank candidates, ensuring that the winner better represents voter preferences.

“American voters are dissatisfied with our politics, and in 27 city ballot measures in a row, they’ve said yes to better choices, better campaigns, and better representation,” Deb Otis, director of research and policy at FairVote, which advocates for RCV, said in a statement. “Everywhere it’s used, voters like and understand RCV, taking advantage of the opportunity to vote honestly and express more choices.”

Mississippi

It wasn’t all good news for democracy.

In Mississippi, Gov. Tate Reeves, a Republican, was reelected despite a strong challenge from Democrat Brandon Presley. Reeves signed a law this year — later blocked by a court — that banned third parties from collecting mail ballots, making it harder to vote for some seniors and people with disabilities, according to voter advocates.

Another law signed by Reeves makes it easier to remove people from the voter rolls, making it more likely that eligible voters could be purged.

Mississippi Secretary of State Michael Watson also was returned to office. Watson successfully fought efforts to have the state’s ban on voting for people with certain convictions overturned. In 2021, Watson criticized the Biden administration’s efforts to promote voter registration, saying they will encourage “woke college and university students” to cast a ballot.

“You’ve got an uninformed citizen who may not be prepared and ready to vote,” Watson said.

The U.S Capitol Building ahead of inaugural ceremonies for President Joe Biden on Jan. 18, 2021 in Washington, D.C. A year from now, the nation’s voters will decide another presidential contest — likely one that pits the same two candidates against each other.?(Joe Raedle/Getty Images)

The last time America elected a president, it led to a deadly assault on the U.S. Capitol and a failed coup that gravely damaged the political system and marred the peaceful transfer of power for the first time in U.S. history.

A year from now, the nation’s voters will decide another presidential contest — likely one that pits the same two candidates against each other.

Despite a slew of arrests and felony convictions stemming from the events of Jan. 6, 2021, there’s little sign that those who attacked democracy last time have significantly moderated their outlook.

Former President Donald Trump has warned that, if restored to power, he’ll seek retribution against his enemies. An unrepentant election denier runs one house of Congress. Threats of political violence, now commonplace, are said to have affected key voting decisions made by elected officials. And 3 out of 4 respondents to a recent poll think American democracy is at risk in the election, with nearly a quarter saying patriots may have to use violence to save the country.

“The United States electoral process, and indeed American democracy itself, is under great stress,” warned a September report by a group of election experts for the Safeguarding Democracy Project. “No longer can we take for granted that people will accept election results as legitimate.”

Since the tumult of January 2021, politicians, advocacy groups, and media outlets have rightly warned about a range of threats to a free and fair 2024 election — from problems with voter access and election administration to the potential for violence and chaos, or outright subversion of results, in the post-election period.

Perhaps less noticed has been the progress made toward shoring up the system — chiefly in the form of federal legislation making it harder to subvert a presidential election.

That’s why, with a year before voting culminates next November, it’s crucial to take stock of where the nation stands, and to identify where, in the view of election experts and voter advocates, the major vulnerabilities remain.

Election subversion

Perhaps the fear that looms largest in many observers’ minds is a repeat in some form of the failed, multi-pronged plot to overturn the election that culminated with the Jan. 6, 2021 attack — but one that succeeds this time.

For some, the recent ascension of Rep. Mike Johnson, R-La., to the role of speaker of the House adds to the sense of anxiety.

The New York Times has called Johnson “the most important architect” of congressional Republicans’ objections to the 2020 election results. Soon after the election, Johnson rallied 125 other GOP representatives to sign a legal brief arguing that President Joe Biden’s win should be overturned.

The Louisiana Republican then led the effort to get Republicans to refuse to certify the results, and he voted against certification in Arizona and Pennsylvania.

Johnson has never expressed regret for his role in the bid to overturn the results, or acknowledged that Biden was the legitimate winner.

“Johnson’s record on democracy is overtly dangerous, and his newfound power presents an acute threat to American elections,” an Oct. 26 email from a Democratic group of chief election officials, the Democratic Association of Secretaries of State, warned reporters.

There’s little doubt that having a leading election denier running the House is damaging to U.S. democracy in myriad ways — not least by further mainstreaming a dangerous ideology.

But, asked at an Oct. 25 news conference whether he was afraid that Johnson would try to overturn the election, Biden answered: “No.”

“Just like I was not worried that the last guy would be able to overturn the election,” Biden continued. “They had about 60 lawsuits and they all went to the Supreme Court and every time they lost. I understand the Constitution.”

Election law experts largely agree, noting that the speaker has no formal role in the certification process. And, they point out, it takes a full vote of both chambers to actually reject electoral votes — making it highly unlikely to succeed. For all the justified concern about what happened in 2020, no objection to a state’s electoral votes got more than seven votes in the Senate.

As important, experts say, the Electoral Count Reform Act, approved last year in response to Jan. 6, makes it all but impossible for Congress to overturn an election, no matter who’s in charge.

“The ability of Congress to interfere in the certification of a presidential election was already limited,” said Adav Noti, senior vice president and legal director of the Campaign Legal Center, which helped push for the ECRA. With the reform in place, Noti added, ”it’s even harder now for Congress to do anything other than properly certify the election.”

The ECRA, which reformed the outdated Electoral Count Act of 1887, made clear that the vice president’s role in certification is purely ministerial. He or she has no authority to reject a state’s electoral votes, as Jan. 6 rioters hoped to pressure Vice President Mike Pence to do.

More important, the ECRA laid out a judicial process for states to resolve disputes over electoral votes before they reach Congress. And it barred members of Congress from objecting to electoral votes that have already been approved by that judicial process — ensuring, essentially, that federal courts, not partisan politicians in Washington or the states, are in control.

That same provision of the law also addressed another avenue for subversion: State lawmakers or officials could corrupt their state’s vote count long before Congress meets, by changing election rules after the fact or just appointing electors directly.

Trump and his allies schemed to do that in 2020, by pressing legislatures to declare a “failed election” and substitute their own slates. Since then, lawmakers in Wisconsin, North Carolina, and Georgia, among other states, have moved to gain more control over elections, raising concerns about the possibility for state-level subversion.

But under the ECRA, states must appoint their electors according to state laws that existed before the election. That makes state-level subversion much harder.

“There was a fear that state legislatures would come in afterwards and appoint the electors they want anyway,” said Edward B. Foley, an election law professor at Ohio State University and an expert on the Electoral College. “That can’t be done under the ECRA.”

Chaos and delay

But though the law on paper is clear, Foley said he worries about a massive glut of election litigation, all filed in the immediate pre- and post-election period in one close, pivotal state.

The result, and perhaps the intention, could be to overwhelm the courts, potentially delaying decisions until a state risks missing the Dec. 11 “safe harbor” deadline. That could mean its electoral votes might not be counted.

“The American judiciary is not built for thousands and thousands of hours of attention to election matters,” said Foley. “So I think there are reasons to fear that something really gets out of hand in terms of litigation, and you start bumping up against those deadlines.”

That threat could be exacerbated by a little-noticed aspect of the Supreme Court’s June ruling in a major elections case, Moore v. Harper.

The court rejected the claim, pushed by conservatives, that state legislatures have essentially free rein to make election rules, unconstrained by state courts. But, as the election law scholar Rick Hasen has noted, the justices did give themselves the power to second-guess state courts if they decide state courts went too far in regulating an election.

This authority, Hasen has written, is going to be “hanging out there, a new tool to be used to rein in especially voter-protective rulings of state courts. Every expansion of voting rights in the context of federal litigation will now yield a potential second federal lawsuit with uncertain results.”

Those statutory deadlines that Foley worries about also concern David Becker, the executive director of the Center for Election Innovation and Research.

He warns that election deniers — including grifters looking to exploit Trump voters’ fears of a stolen election for financial gain — will be even more effective this time at sowing disinformation if their candidate loses on election night. That could lead to even more, and more unpredictable, political violence.

“Instead of having it be focused on just one place at one time — the Capitol on January 6th — we could see it focused on the counting process, the certification process, on the meeting of the Electoral College, at various points in time in various places,” said Becker, a leading expert on election administration. “From talking to people around the country, there is a concern about efforts to basically undermine the will of the people.”

That kind of chaos could bog things down enough that the election’s statutory deadlines — the safe harbor deadline, the meeting of the Electoral College six days later, and the Jan. 6 certification by Congress — come into play and force a halt to the process. Indeed, Becker noted, that appears to have been part of the Trump team’s strategy last time around.

“The effort to string this out and delay until the winning candidate has his hand on the Bible on the steps of the Capitol — that’s almost certainly going to happen,” said Becker. “They’re going to do everything they can to slow down the mechanics of elections.”

Voter suppression

It may seem quaint in an era when there are fears about outright subversion. But perhaps the simplest way a free and fair election might be compromised is through old-fashioned voter suppression — something that many Democrats would argue already happened not too long ago.

An October report by the Voting Rights Lab, a voter advocacy group that tracks voting laws across the country, found that voters will face “significant new restrictions” in four key swing states: Georgia, New Hampshire, North Carolina, and Wisconsin. (A fifth swing state, Pennsylvania, will have both restrictive and expansive new voting laws in place.)

“Swing state voters often determine the outcome of our presidential elections,” said Liz Avore, a senior policy adviser for the group. “Millions of those voters will see new rules in 2024 — many restricting access to popular options like early and mail voting. How they respond could just be the difference in a tight presidential race.”

In all five of those states, it will be harder to vote by mail than it was in 2020.

North Carolina might have gone furthest in restricting mail voting. A strict photo ID law, passed in 2018 but newly approved by the state Supreme Court, requires that mail-in ballots, which already had to be notarized or signed by two witnesses, must also include a copy of a photo ID.

A different law passed this year by the state requires that mail ballots be received by 7:30 p.m. on Election Day, where previously they only had to be postmarked by Election Day and received by three days after. In 2020, 11,000 ballots arrived at election offices in those three days, according to figures provided by the Brennan Center.

In Georgia, the state with the smallest margin of victory last time, new rules require voters to provide a specific ID number both when they apply for and when they return a mail-in ballot. There are also tighter rules on when and where ballot drop boxes will be available. And residents are now allowed to challenge the eligibility of an unlimited number of voters, potentially overloading election officials with meritless challenges. Last year, 92,000 registrations were reportedly challenged.

Wisconsin, another state that could be pivotal, also made mail voting harder. State Supreme Court rulings have banned ballot drop boxes and barred third parties from returning mail ballots — restrictions that weren’t in place in 2020.

But that might not be the last word. The court now has a liberal majority, and a new lawsuit seeks to reinstate drop boxes, as well as expanding access to mail voting in other ways.

In Pennsylvania, as in North Carolina, mail-in ballots must now be received by Election Day to be counted. In 2020, in an accommodation to COVID-19, they only needed to be postmarked by Election Day.

Still, that restrictive change could be canceled out by an expansive one: This year, the state began automatically registering voters who have contact with the state DMV unless they opt out, making it easier to get on the rolls.

And New Hampshire will have some of the most antiquated and restrictive voting rules in the nation next year. Thanks to the expiration of COVID-19-era accommodations that temporarily expanded access to mail-in and early voting, most voters will have no other option than voting in person on Election Day — something that’s the case in only two other states.

It’s always hard to gauge just how many voters will be affected by new voting laws. Indeed, scholars increasingly appear to agree that changes to voting rules affect outcomes only in the very closest races.

But Biden won Georgia in 2020 by fewer than 12,000 votes, and Wisconsin by just over 20,000. If those or any of the other states with restrictive new laws are equally close next year, it could be hard to rule out the possibility that these measures — which are generally thought to affect more Democratic voters than Republican ones — made the difference.

That likely wouldn’t trigger the kind of national crisis that a conflict over electoral votes at the Capitol would. But it would compromise the election, and further undermine democracy, nonetheless.

Still, too much hand-wringing over the laws could be counter-productive.

Becker suggested that the biggest impact of these restrictive laws could be to deter infrequent voters by conveying the message — in most cases, false — that voting is arduous and there’s an organized effort to stop you from going to the polls.

“Those messages are going to make it less likely for an infrequent voter to show up,” said Becker, noting that Trump allies’ claims that the system had been rigged by widespread illegal voting may have worked to depress Republican turnout in the 2021 Georgia U.S. Senate runoffs.

“The best way to suppress a vote is to get the voter to suppress themselves.”

Election administration troubles

It’s worth remembering that, despite the chaos and violence of the post-election period in 2020-21, the voting itself confounded some predictions by going remarkably smoothly.

Facing the twin challenges of a pandemic and a concerted campaign by the incumbent to sow distrust over fraud, election administrators nationwide provided an accessible, secure process that featured the highest turnout since the 1890s — a genuine triumph of democracy.

Still, three years later, the U.S. elections infrastructure is under strain. A mass exodus of local election officials, caused in part by a barrage of threats and intimidation from denialists, has made headlines and sparked concern.

Pennsylvania, North Carolina, Virginia, and Texas are all said to have had top officials leave. And a recent report by the good-government group Issue One found that 160 chief local election officials in 11 Western states — around 40% of all chief local election officials in those states — have left their jobs since November 2020.

The report singled out the region’s two swing states, Arizona and Nevada — both hotspots for denialism and threats of violence against administrators — as especially hard hit by the departures.

“As a former county recorder myself, I can attest that the pre-2020 world for election administrators is gone,” Arizona Secretary of State Adrian Fontes said at a Nov. 1 U.S. Senate hearing. “We don’t feel safe in our work because of the harassment and threats that are based in lies.”

Fontes, a Democrat, called the issue a “threat to American democracy.”

But, while everyone agrees threats and harassment targeting election officials are a serious concern, fears about the impact on 2024 may be overblown.

Becker, who works closely with election officials across the country, noted that in both states, the key counties that have seen departures have found effective replacements. In Arizona, both Maricopa and Pima counties have elected recorders who have prioritized nonpartisan election management and voter access. And when the respected elections director for Clark County, Nevada stepped down, he was replaced by a deputy who had worked in the office for 25 years.

“Although I have many concerns about the election, one of them is not whether the election officials are going to manage an accessible, secure process,” said Becker. “I think election officials will do what they have always done, which is to rise above this and provide an easy convenient way for all eligible voters to vote, and a transparent method for counting those ballots that stands up to scrutiny.”

Still, the task of administrators could be complicated by the presence at the polls of self-appointed voter fraud watchdogs. Responding to Trump’s lies about illegal voting, conservative activists are mobilizing to scour the voting process for evidence of irregularities.

One nationwide coalition of groups organized by a top Trump election lawyer, the Election Integrity Network, is working to recruit and train activists to serve as poll-watchers and on local elections boards. In Virginia’s 2021 election — the first contest where the group was active — it trained 45,000 poll watchers and officials and covered 85% of polling places, it has said.

Voting rights advocates worry that aggressive poll-watchers could intimidate voters or overwhelm officials with meritless voter challenges, slowing down the voting process.

Democrats are blunter. “The goal is to disenfranchise enough voters that they can win the election,” a staffer for the Virginia Democrats told the New York Times in reference to the group’s activities in the state’s current election.

Yet more potential problems

These are far from the only things that could go wrong. One wildcard that’s causing concern is the possibility of a “contingent election”.

The “No Labels” party has launched a well-funded campaign in support of a bipartisan “unity ticket’. If it succeeds in winning one or more states, the upshot could be to deny either major-party candidate 270 electoral votes. Even if No Labels fails to win a state, an Electoral College tie would also leave both candidates one vote short of 270.

If no one reaches 270, the Constitution requires Congress to choose the president. But no law governs how that process would work. The result, two advocates for Protect Democracy wrote recently, based on conversations with constitutional scholars, would be “chaos and crisis.”

Another threat that’s causing alarm among some election security advocates stems from the multi-state effort by Trump allies to access software used in voting machines. In Colorado, Pennsylvania, Georgia, and Michigan, activists worked with election officials or law enforcement to gain access to the software.

Most experts say it isn’t likely that they could change votes at a scale large enough to affect the outcome of a presidential election — in part because every swing state now uses paper ballots as a backup so that results can be verified.

The more realistic worry is that hackers could draw attention to a breach in order to stoke anger and controversy, giving the election loser additional ammunition to claim that the result was rigged. That might not subvert results, but would help undermine the election’s legitimacy in the eyes of some voters.

One leading democracy advocate has a very different fear: that the election will be legitimate, but that its result will nonetheless put our system of government at risk.

“We are not out of the woods, but that danger (of election subversion) has been greatly reduced,” Ian Bassin, the founder and executive director of Protect Democracy, and the recent recipient of a MacArthur “genius” grant, said in an October podcast interview.

“The bigger danger is that an autocrat will simply win the 2024 election.”

Election workers process ballots at the Arapahoe County Elections Facility in Littleton, Colorado, on Nov. 3, 2020. (Carl Payne for Colorado Newsline)

Lately, a rough consensus has emerged among people who study the impact of voting policies: Though they often spark fierce partisan fighting, most changes to voting laws do little to affect overall turnout, much less election results.

But one fast-growing reform appears to stand out as an exception.

When every registered voter gets sent a ballot in the mail — a system known as universal vote-by-mail — voting rates tend to rise, numerous studies have found.

Advocates for mail voting say these findings haven’t gotten the attention they deserve, and that they should lead more states that want to boost turnout to adopt UVM, as it’s called.

“[T]o a remarkable degree, most of the nation’s leading journalists, democracy reform organizations, and elected officials continue to largely ignore, downplay — or even dismiss outright – the potentially profound implications of these noticeably high turnout rates,” said a research paper released last month by the National Vote at Home Institute, which advocates for increased use of mail voting.

Currently, eight states — California, Colorado, Hawaii, Nevada, Oregon, Utah, Vermont, and Washington — use UVM.

Vote by mail attacked by Trump

Efforts in recent years by many states to make it easier to vote by mail prompted a furious backlash from former President Donald Trump and his backers, who have repeatedly claimed, without evidence, that mail voting is dangerously vulnerable to fraud.

Perhaps no state incurred Trump’s wrath more than Nevada, which, along with California, introduced UVM in 2020 in response to the pandemic.

“The governor of Nevada should not be in charge of ballots. The ballots are going to be a disaster for our country,” Trump said ahead of the 2020 election, referring to the state’s then-governor, Democrat Steve Sisolak (In fact, Sisolak was not “in charge of ballots.” Secretary of State Barbara Cegavske, a Republican, was). “You’re going to have problems with the ballots like nobody has ever seen before.”

Since replacing Sisolak this year, Nevada Gov. Joe Lombardo, a Republican, has pushed for eliminating UVM. (“Sending ballots to more than 1.9 million registered voters is inefficient and unnecessary,” Lombardo said in January.) But Democrats, who control the state legislature, have shown no interest in scrapping the system.

So great was the GOP’s suspicion of the practice in 2022 that some voters were told by party activists to hold onto mail ballots and hand them in on Election Day at their polling place, rather than mailing them.

But Trump and Republicans have lately backtracked, telling supporters to take advantage of mail voting rather than handing an advantage to Democrats. In June, the Republican National Committee announced a new get-out-the-vote drive encouraging early and mail voting.

States tinker with mail voting

Still, over 20 states have sought to restrict mail voting since 2020. Ohio has shortened the timeframe to apply for mail ballots and imposed new signature requirements, while Arizona now removes people from its list to receive a mail ballot if they go for more than two years without voting.

Among states looking to expand mail voting, not all have gone as far as UVM. Both New York and Pennsylvania, among other states, have loosened their rules to allow anyone to cast an absentee ballot by mail, rather than requiring an excuse — a system known as no-excuse absentee. But the voter still must take the trouble to apply to receive their absentee ballot, rather than being mailed one automatically.

Experts say there isn’t strong evidence that these more modest approaches to mail voting do much to boost turnout

Other reforms that likewise have become core to the Democratic platform on voting policy, like adding early voting opportunities, also haven’t consistently been shown to increase voting rates. Allowing people to register at the polls — often called same-day registration — has in some studies been associated with small turnout increases.

By contrast, the research on UVM finds a consistent and significant impact.

Advocates say that’s hardly surprising. Under UVM, election officials simply mail ballots to directly everyone on the voter rolls, almost literally putting a ballot in voters’ hands. Voters can return their ballot either through the mail or by leaving it in a secure ballot dropbox.

Research studies

A 2022 paper by Eric McGhee and Jennifer Paluch of the Public Policy Institute of California and Mindy Romero of the University of Southern California found that UVM increased turnout among registered voters by 5.6 percentage points in the 2020 election — what the authors called “a substantial and robust positive effect.”

A 2018 paper by the data firm Pantheon Analytics, which works for Democrats and progressive groups, compared Utah counties that used UVM with those that didn’t, and found that the system boosted turnout by 5-7 percentage points among registered voters.

And a forthcoming paper by Michael Ritter of Washington State University, to be published in the November 2023 edition of the Election Law Journal, looks at various mail voting systems over the last decade and finds that UVM led to an 8-point increase in registered voter turnout.

By and large, states that use UVM appear to see higher voting rates than those that don’t. The National Vote at Home Institute research paper found that eight of the 11 states that used UVM in 2020 were in the top 15 states for turnout of active registered voters. And none of those eight were battleground states, which tend to see higher turnout.

Two other states using UVM for the first time in 2020 ranked first and second on improved turnout compared to 2016 — Hawaii, which saw a 14% jump, and Utah, which saw an 11% jump.

The paper also found that UVM has a particularly large impact on turnout rates for young voters, Black and Latino voters, who tend to vote at lower rates than average.

No advantage for one party?

Advocates say there’s another reason why policymakers should have no reluctance to embrace UVM: Despite its impact on turnout, it doesn’t help one party more than the other, according to numerous studies.

“Universal VBM does not appear to tilt turnout toward the Democratic party, nor does it appear to affect election outcomes meaningfully,” a representative 2020 paper by a group of Stanford University political scientists concluded.

McGhee said that finding could have the effect of turning down the political heat on the issue.

“Hopefully as the evidence gets out that it boosts turnout without impacting partisan outcomes, that part of it will fade a little bit,” he said. “And it’ll just be seen as a good-government reform.”

In September, the GOP-controlled Wisconsin?Senate voted to oust Meagan Wolfe as the head of the Wisconsin Elections Commission.?Wolfe was the target of false conspiracy theories about illegal voting during the 2020 election, but she has refused to step down.?(Henry Redman/Wisconsin Examiner)

In Wisconsin, Republican lawmakers are threatening to impeach both the state’s election administrator, who is highly regarded nationally, and a state Supreme Court justice despite a ruling by the state’s judicial commission that the justice had done nothing wrong — effectively nullifying a recent statewide election she won, Democrats say.

In North Carolina, a bill that would give the legislature control of state and local election boards — potentially allowing lawmakers to overturn results — could soon become law.

And Alabama continues to defy the U.S. Supreme Court by refusing to draw a new congressional district with a Black majority.

Other states are seeing efforts by politicians to gain a political advantage by curtailing the power of voters.

It’s all part of a burst of anti-democratic activity at the state level, as Republican lawmakers and officials in recent weeks have run roughshod over long-standing norms of good government — and sometimes the clear will of voters — in order to maximize their party’s political clout.

Much of this procedural extremism has aimed to protect GOP gerrymanders — when lawmakers use their power to draw district lines to advantage their side — reflecting the sky-high stakes attached to the redistricting process.

But to those working to protect democracy, it’s a reminder that, for all the deserved attention to national threats — the attempted coup of Jan. 6, 2021, the looming danger of election subversion next year — some of the most explicit efforts to undermine the popular will have for years been happening in the states.

Indeed, experts say any scheme to thwart a free and fair national election in 2024 would likely center on corrupting one or more state-level election systems — just as was attempted in 2020.

“We should call this what it is: an effort to lay the groundwork to subvert the will of the voters in future elections,” said Joanna Lydgate, the CEO of the pro-democracy group States United Action. “While the focus is often on the national picture, our elections are run by the states. That means we need to keep shining a light on state-level efforts that undermine our democracy. It’s the only way to shut it down.”

‘An attempt to nullify an election’

Wisconsin has generated the biggest headlines lately. In September, the GOP-controlled Senate voted to oust Meagan Wolfe as the head of the Wisconsin Elections Commission.

Wolfe, a respected and nonpartisan elections official who had been appointed to her post by the commission in 2018, was the target of false conspiracy theories about illegal voting during the 2020 election. A recent hearing on whether to remove her became a platform for election deniers making debunked fraud claims.

Wolfe has refused to step down.

“The Senate’s vote today to remove me is not a referendum on the job I do but rather a reaction to not achieving the political outcome they desire,” Wolfe said after the vote. “The political outcome they desired is to have someone in this position of their own choosing that would bend to those political pressures.”

Attorney General Josh Kaul, a Democrat, has filed a lawsuit to stop the removal, claiming the Senate lacks the authority for it.

A group of Republican lawmakers is now circulating a resolution to impeach Wolfe.

Wisconsin’s Republican lawmakers are also considering impeaching Supreme Court Justice Janet Protasiewicz, who was elected in April by a resounding 11-point margin.

Though the state’s judicial elections are officially nonpartisan, candidates typically are open about their political leanings in order to win the support of a major party. Protasiewicz, a liberal, was backed by Democrats, while her conservative opponent was supported by the GOP.

Lawmakers have cited Protasiewicz’s campaign-trail comments that the state’s legislative maps? — which are being challenged in a case set to come before the state Supreme Court — are “rigged.” But other justices have similarly voiced opinions on hot-button issues without facing repercussions.

The state’s Judicial Commission has said the complaints against Protasiewicz have no merit.

Wisconsin’s legislative maps are among the most heavily gerrymandered in the country — a 2020 Harvard study ranked them as the worst, on par with Jordan, Bahrain, and the Congo. They’ve consistently given the GOP large majorities — currently 22-11 in the Senate and 64-35 in the House — despite the state tilting slightly Democratic in most recent statewide races.

The court appears poised to strike down the maps and order fairer districts to be drawn, threatening Republicans’ hold on power. But impeaching Protasiewicz would leave the court evenly divided between liberals and conservatives, meaning the gerrymandered maps — and the GOP’s large majorities — would be much more likely to survive.

Ben Wikler, the chair of the state Democratic Party, has called the impeachment threat “a totally unconstitutional attempt to nullify the last election and effectively abolish judicial independence in Wisconsin.”

Wisconsin’s legislative leaders have often pushed the envelope to gain a political advantage. When Gov. Tony Evers, a Democrat, was first elected in 2018, lawmakers immediately passed a measure to weaken his power.

But going after Protasiewicz just months after her comfortable election win may not be popular with voters — potentially making it a bridge too far for some lawmakers.

“I think people are likely upset — she was elected by a wide margin in a free and fair election,” said Edgar Lin, the Wisconsin policy advocate and counsel for Protect Democracy, which works to preserve fair elections. “And that spans across the political spectrum. Many people in red districts voted for her.”

That reality has legislative leaders exploring other solutions. Last week, House Speaker Robin Vos, a Republican, unveiled new legislation that he said would establish a fair and nonpartisan redistricting process. But Evers rejected the plan, saying it would still ultimately leave lawmakers in charge.

Not that impeachment is off the table. Vos last week appointed a panel of former Supreme Court justices to study the issue and report back — a move widely seen as a delaying tactic. He didn’t reveal the panel’s members, but one former justice reported to be on it is a conservative who donated to Protasiewicz’s opponent in the election.

‘The power to decide contested elections’

But when it comes to protecting gerrymandered maps, perhaps no state has gone further than Alabama.

Back in June, the U.S. Supreme Court upheld a lower court ruling that found Alabama’s congressional map discriminated against Black voters, and that ordered the state to draw an additional Black-majority district, or something close to it. Only one of the map’s seven districts was majority-Black, even though Black people are about 27% of the state’s population.

Instead, in a striking act of defiance, Alabama drew a new map that still had only one Black-majority district. On Sept. 5, a federal court struck down the new map, saying it was “deeply troubled that the state enacted a map that the state readily admits does not provide the remedy we said federal law requires.”

Now, Alabama has appealed that ruling back to the U.S. Supreme Court, hoping for a delay that will allow it to use the discriminatory map next year.

Alabama Attorney General Steve Marshall, whose office has led the case, was one of a group of state attorneys general who urged the U.S. Supreme Court to block the certification of electors in the 2020 presidential election. He has refused to say that President Joe Biden was “duly elected.”

Meanwhile, North Carolina lawmakers are advancing a bill — it passed the House Tuesday — that would authorize the GOP-controlled legislature to appoint state and local election board members. Currently, that’s the role of the governor, Democrat Roy Cooper.

Cooper has said he’ll veto the measure. But because Republicans enjoy super majorities in both chambers, thanks to gerrymandered maps, they can override his veto.

Currently, the governor appoints all five members of the state board, though no more than three can be from one party. County boards are also split 3-2 in favor of the governor’s party.

The legislation would create even-numbered boards, with lawmakers from each party picking half the members. Republicans argue that structure will encourage bipartisanship.

But critics say it would likely mean frequent deadlocks. One result, voting rights advocates fear, could be to prevent counties from expanding the number of early voting sites — something Republicans have strongly opposed.

Even more worryingly, the boards might refuse to certify election results, which could send the issue to the courts or the legislature, raising the threat of subversion. North Carolina provided former President Donald Trump with his narrowest margin of victory in 2020, and could be pivotal again next year.

In a recent op-ed, Cooper called the bill a “backdoor attempt to limit early voting and consolidate the legislature’s quest for the power to decide contested elections.”

This is just the latest Republican effort to reduce Cooper’s power over elections since he was elected in 2016.

It comes not long after the legislature passed a bill that would make voting more difficult, especially targeting mail-in voting. Cooper vetoed the measure but Republicans are expected to override the veto.

Cleta Mitchell, the Trump lawyer who played a key role in the effort to overturn the 2020 election, met with lawmakers drafting the bill.

For good measure, the legislature also released a draft of the state budget Sept. 20 that includes a provision exempting lawmakers from the state’s public records law. One ethics watchdog called the measure, which is expected to become law, “a devastating blow to North Carolinians’ right to know what their elected officials are doing.”

And last month, the state’s Judicial Standards Commission launched an investigation into Supreme Court Justice Anita Earls, the court’s only Black woman.

Earls, a Democrat, was asked in an interview why the lawyers arguing before the court are disproportionately white men. She responded by talking about implicit bias and saying that white men “get more respect” and are “treated better” at the court.

Earls has sued the commission, claiming the investigation violates her free speech rights.

‘This would open the door to monsters’

The events in Wisconsin, Alabama, and North Carolina have generated national headlines. But gambits by lawmakers in other states have flown further under the radar.

In Ohio, the Supreme Court has ruled five times that the state’s current legislative maps are unconstitutional gerrymanders favoring Republicans. But the bipartisan commission that’s supposed to draw fair maps hasn’t met since May 2022.

It has made almost no progress, because GOP legislative leaders can’t agree on who to appoint to it. The panel was scheduled to finally meet again Sept. 20, just two days before a Sept. 22 deadline imposed by the secretary of state.

Lawmakers’ goal appears to be to run out the clock and ram through skewed maps with little public scrutiny. Because the Supreme Court now has a conservative majority, it’s expected to green-light whatever lawmakers come up with.

Last month, a bid by the GOP-controlled legislature to make it harder for Ohioans to amend the state constitution was overwhelmingly defeated by voters.

In Florida, a subtler scheme is underway. Acting on a request from the speaker of the House, the state Supreme Court last month created a commission to study changing the way prosecutors and judges are elected.

Advocates of criminal justice reform say the goal is a judicial gerrymander that would undercut the power of Black voters and make it much harder to elect reform prosecutors of the kind that Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis has targeted.

“Judicial redistricting in Florida would almost certainly be a near-fatal blow against the reform prosecutor movement in the state,” one prominent reform advocate has written.

The kind of power grabs that are currently playing out in the states aren’t entirely new. Many of the extreme gerrymanders that lawmakers are now fighting to preserve were first enacted over a decade ago.

But today, advocates say, these efforts are even more dangerous for democracy. That’s because, by giving lawmakers more power over elections or over their state’s judicial system, many of these schemes strengthen and reinforce the ultimate threat of outright election subversion.

“If they can impeach someone successfully to stop them from ruling in a way they don’t like, what will they do after the 2024 election?” asked Wikler, the Wisconsin Democratic chair, referring to the threat to impeach Protasiewicz. “It was one vote in our state Supreme Court that prevented the 2020 election from being overturned in Wisconsin. And they know who the justices were, so they could just suspend them. This would open the door to monsters that I don’t think they’d be able to control.”

(Photo by Stephen Maturen/Getty Images)

It’s no secret: U.S. democracy is under serious threat.

Politicians use rigged maps?to entrench themselves in power, allowing them to ignore the will of voters. Hundreds of members of Congress, state lawmakers, and top state officials — including chief elections officials —?deny the results?of the last presidential contest. And a leading candidate for 2024 talks openly about abusing the power of the federal government to?retaliate?against his political opponents.

“No longer can we take for granted that people will accept election results as legitimate,” warned a recent?report?by the Safeguarding Democracy Project, a committee of election experts convened by the University of California, Los Angeles School of Law. “The United States faces continued threats to peaceful transitions of power after election authorities (or courts) have declared a presidential election winner.”

No surprise, then, that more than 8 in 10 respondents to a recent?poll?said they were worried about the state of American democracy, with 1 in 4 saying they’re very worried.

But much of the media is failing to convey the danger.

At the first Republican presidential debate last month,?not a single question?was asked about democracy.

Even when the subject is given attention, it’s often treated in the same way journalists cover fights over more traditional issues like taxes, health care, or education: Reporters quote both sides — those looking to restrict democracy, and those working to protect it — assess the political implications, and perhaps lament our growing “polarization”.

A growing number of newsrooms are recognizing that this approach doesn’t meet the moment. Democracy is different from those other issues, because it underlies all of them. Without a healthy democracy, voters can’t make collective decisions that have legitimacy, no matter the issue. Nor can Americans count on having a free press to cover the debate.

That’s why a drive is underway to help bolster the foundations of our system through “pro-democracy” coverage. On Friday, States Newsroom is joining 135 news organizations for?Democracy Day 2023, a nationwide pro-democracy reporting collaborative, launched last year, that’s organized by Montclair State University’s Center for Cooperative Media in New Jersey and the Institute for Nonprofit News.

The pro-democracy coverage that participating newsrooms will produce can take a range of forms. It might be journalism that shines a light on the most urgent threats to democracy and holds anti-democratic actors accountable.

But it also can be journalism that gives citizens the tools they need to participate in the process; or that explains how local government works and helps people access needed services; or that uplifts the ordinary Americans working to protect and strengthen democracy.

“It doesn’t have to be negative and only focus on the threats,” said Beatrice Forman, a reporter with the Philadelphia Inquirer and Democracy Day’s project coordinator. “Pro-democracy journalism can also focus on solutions to those threats: Who are the people on the ground doing things to enfranchise people and to make people feel comfortable exercising their civic rights?”

Here are just a few of the stories that States Newsroom’s 36 outlets have produced for Democracy Day:

• The Alabama Reflector?is digging into a voting conundrum: Why is the state’s turnout rate sliding — it averaged?just under 50%?in the last two national elections — even as the number of Alabamians on the voter rolls has increased?
• The Kansas Reflector is asking how campaigns and election officials can?ensure young voters stay engaged. They turned out in high numbers for an August referendum on abortion rights, the Reflector notes, but many then stayed home in November.

• The Michigan Advance?looks at the impact of the state’s major voting rights expansion since 2018, which has included same-day voter registration, no-excuse mail voting and more. Advocates of expanded access to the ballot say they aren’t finished yet.

• The Nebraska Examiner is?showing readers how their government works, breaking down the functions of the state’s executive branch and spotlighting the decision-makers running key departments.

• NC Newsline is helping North Carolinians exercise their democratic rights, by explaining how to ensure the voting experience goes smoothly now that the state’s voter ID law is in effect.
• The Kentucky Lantern talks with election officials about shortage of poll workers ahead of the 2023 general election.
• And the Pennsylvania Capital-Star is highlighting how the state’s closed primary system — in which only registered Democrats and Republicans can vote — leaves out over 1 million registered voters. What could be more democratic, Capital-Star Editor Kim Lyons asks, than opening the process of choosing candidates to more people?

It may be only one day. But Democracy Day aims to kick-start a more permanent shift in approach.

The goal, said Forman, “is to really catalyze an industry-wide transformation towards content that doesn’t treat politics like a game, doesn’t cater to political insiders, (but instead) caters to actual people wanting to know more about how their government works.”

The Declaration of Independence. (Getty Images)

There’s a growing feeling, among both experts and ordinary Americans, that our democracy isn’t functioning well — and even that it’s under threat.

“American democracy is cracking,” the Washington Post reported August 18.

“I’m terrified,” one democracy expert told the paper. “I think we are in bad shape, and I don’t know a way out.”

Forty-nine percent of respondents to a recent Associated Press poll said U.S. democracy isn’t working well, and 56% said the Republican party is doing a bad job of upholding democracy. For the Democratic party, the figure was 47%.

And just 16% of respondents to a 2022 CNN poll said they were very confident that U.S. election results reflected the will of the people.

But viewers of Wednesday night’s GOP primary presidential debate on Fox News wouldn’t have guessed any of this.

Though the network’s on-screen banner and backdrop read “Fox News Democracy 24,” the eight candidates onstage weren’t asked about elections, voting, or democracy throughout the two-hour production. Former President Donald Trump, the front runner, refused to participate and opted for a separate online interview with fired Fox News host Tucker Carlson.

The debate moderators, Fox’s Brett Baier and Martha MacCallum, did find time to get the candidates’ views not only on the economy, education, immigration, and the war in Ukraine, but also about transgender girls playing high school sports and even the evidence for UFOs.

The debate did touch on a few issues that have implications for democracy.

Both entrepreneur Vivek Ramaswamy and Sen. Tim Scott, R-S.C., railed against what they called the “weaponization” of the Department of Justice for prosecuting Trump over his attempt to stay in power after losing the election, and his effort to hold onto classified government documents after he left office.

And several candidates, including Scott, former New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie, former U.N. ambassador Nikki Haley, and (grudgingly) Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis said when asked by the moderators that former Vice President Mike Pence, another candidate on stage, did the right thing when he resisted Trump’s pressure not to certify the 2020 results.

“Mike Pence stood for the Constitution,” said Christie. “And he deserves not grudging credit, he deserves our thanks as Americans for putting his oath of office and the Constitution of the United States before personal, political, and unfair pressure.”

But there was no discussion at all of elections or voting policy. That omission was all the more noticeable because, on the state level, the last two-and-a-half years have seen a rush to pass laws that make major changes to the election process — often, on the GOP side, the result of intense pressure from party activists and voters, who believed Trump’s lies about fraud in the 2020 election and demanded that lawmakers tighten the rules.

Many of these new measures, which have overhauled everything from how votes are cast to how they’re counted to how elections offices are funded, were drafted with help from the growing network of Washington-based think tanks and advocacy groups focused on election issues, several featuring high-profile GOP former elected officials.

And last month, U.S. House Republicans used a public hearing in Atlanta to release a sweeping 224-page elections bill which Democrats called the most restrictive in decades. That legislation was passed 8-4 by the U.S. House Administration Committee in July but has not yet received a vote in the full House.

One possible reason that elections policy was absent entirely from Wednesday night’s debate: In April, Fox News paid over $787 million to settle a defamation lawsuit filed by the voting machine company Dominion, in connection with the broadcaster’s promotion of lies about the 2020 election. Since then the network has mostly steered clear of the issue.

While the moderators asked the questions, any of the candidates could have chosen to bring up elections issues on their own, but didn’t.

And that choice may reflect a new reality about the politics of the issue: Though Republican voters strongly support stricter voting rules, after Jan. 6 the anti-voter-fraud crusade that Trump sought to lead has perhaps become too controversial for presidential candidates to put at the center of their pitch to voters.

Of course, it’s a long campaign, and the candidates will have a second chance to talk to voters about democracy when they debate again on Sept. 27 at the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library in California.

David Leist of Columbus, left, a field organizer for Ohio Citizen Action, hands registered voter Richard Hall a flyer with information while canvassing against Ohio Issue 1 which if passed at the Aug. 8 special election would require a 60% vote to pass future citizen-initiated amendments, including the Reproductive Freedom Amendment, which will be on the ballot in November, on July 25, 2023, in a neighborhood on the northeast side of Columbus. (Photo by Graham Stokes for Ohio Capital Journal)

CLEVELAND — Ohioans over the last century have used the state’s ballot initiative process to pass constitutional amendments that raised the minimum wage, integrated the National Guard and removed the phrase “white male” from the constitution’s list of voter eligibility requirements.

Now, lawmakers want to make it much tougher for an initiative to be approved. Opponents of the effort, who are leading in the polls, say doing so would undermine democracy. Whoever prevails, the verdict could reverberate far beyond the Buckeye State, as other states also eye limits on ballot initiatives.

Since mid-July, Ohioans have been voting on a new ballot measure, drafted by the Republican-controlled legislature and known as Issue 1, that would require future initiatives to be approved by 60% of voters, rather than the simple majority needed now. Also, starting on Jan. 1, 2024, the measure would mandate that, to get an issue on the ballot in the first place, backers gather signatures in all 88 Ohio counties, double the 44 now needed.

GOP lawmakers and their supporters say it’s too easy for out-of-state interests to use the initiative process to change the state’s constitution. Among other examples, they point to a 2009 ballot measure that legalized casino gambling in the state, which passed with 52% of the vote after national gambling interests spent over $50 million in support.

States Newsroom partnered with News 5 Cleveland to meet the organizers and canvassers on the ground. The team spent one day with opponents of Issue 1 and the next with supporters.

“We believe that a 60% threshold is absolutely critical to protecting our constitution from these outside influences,” state Sen. Jerry Cirino, a Republican, said in an interview at the headquarters of the Lake County GOP in Painesville, about 30 miles east of Cleveland.

And, though it isn’t a message they emphasize publicly, Republicans also have said that they want to make it easier to stop a measure to protect reproductive rights that will be on the ballot in November.

“After decades of Republicans’ work to make Ohio a pro-life state, the Left intends to write abortion on demand into Ohio’s Constitution,” Rep. Brian Stewart, a leader of the push for Issue 1, wrote in a letter to colleagues in December. “If they succeed, all the work we accomplished by multiple Republican majorities will be undone.”

“Some people say this is all about abortion,” Secretary of State Frank LaRose, a Republican, said in May, in a video obtained by News 5. “Well, you know what? It’s 100% about keeping a radical pro-abortion amendment out of our constitution.”

LaRose, who for months had denied that Issue 1 was about abortion, added that the higher threshold for approval also would be useful down the road to combat other “dangerous plans” from “the left,” including raising the minimum wage and legalizing marijuana.

Power grab seen

Opponents of Issue 1 — a coalition of over 200 groups — call it a brazen power grab by the legislature that threatens Ohio’s democracy.

With state lawmakers entrenched in power in Columbus thanks to gerrymandered maps, opponents argue, the ballot initiative process is the last meaningful avenue left for ordinary Ohioans to effect change. Issue 1 would raise the costs both of the signature-gathering process, by making organizers hire canvassers in all 88 counties rather than just half, and of the campaign itself, by requiring that 60% of voters approve. The result would be to make ballot initiatives usable only by deep-pocketed special interests, opponents say.

And, they add, it would threaten the principle of one person, one vote by allowing just 40% of voters plus one to override the clear will of the people.

“Issue 1 would end majority rule as we know it,” Jen Miller, the executive director of the League of Women Voters of Ohio, told a raucous crowd at a July 20 rally for the “No” campaign at a union hall in Boardman, just outside Youngstown.

Opponents also accuse the GOP of trying to sneak the measure through by setting an Aug. 8 election date — a time when politics is the furthest thing from many voters’ minds — to depress voting rates, since lower turnout is often thought to help Republicans. In last year’s August primaries, turnout dropped to a meager 8%.

Still, the early signs suggest that turnout will be strong.

In the first 13 days of early voting, 231,800 Ohioans voted in person, according to numbers released July 28 by the secretary of state’s office. That’s a higher rate of votes per day than the 136,000 people who voted in person during the first nine days of early voting for last November’s high-profile and competitive U.S. Senate race.

However voters come down, other states will be watching closely.

From Arizona to the Dakotas to Florida, legislators are working to make it harder to get initiatives passed into law, or on the ballot at all. In doing so, they’re taking aim at a form of direct democracy that’s emerged in recent years as a favorite tool of advocates looking to enact popular policies — on issues from health care to the minimum wage to democracy reform — that elected politicians have failed to prioritize.

Sarah Walker, the policy and legal advocacy director for the Ballot Initiative Strategy Center, which works to support progressive ballot measures, said she views the push to restrict ballot initiatives as closely tied to higher-profile efforts, in some states, to tighten voting laws in what voter advocates have called suppression.

“It’s ultimately another step on the road towards authoritarianism and towards consolidated power,” said Walker. “And what happens in Ohio is going to shape … whether or not these attacks on direct democracy are going to continue.”

Ballot initiatives grow popular

Ballot initiatives have found themselves in state lawmakers’ crosshairs just as they’ve become a key method to subvert those lawmakers’ power.

A quarter-century ago, conservatives started using the initiative process — which exists in about half of all states — to make gains they were unable to achieve through legislation, on issues from voter ID to criminal justice to same-sex marriage.

In Ohio, a 2004 gay marriage ban put on the ballot by GOP lawmakers — reportedly at the urging of top White House political strategist Karl Rove — was credited with super-charging conservative turnout, helping President George W. Bush win the state, and with it, reelection.

But after Republicans took full control of a slew of state governments in 2010, the shoe switched to the other foot.

Shut out of state capitols, progressives in many states poured resources into the ballot initiative process, which they’ve used throughout the last decade — including in deep-red states like Utah, Idaho, Kansas, and Arkansas — to expand access to Medicaid, protect abortion rights, boost the minimum wage, establish paid sick leave, reform the redistricting process, liberalize voting rules, legalize marijuana and more.

In some states where Republican legislators have little fear of losing their majorities, the ballot initiative process has become their opponents’ most significant check on lawmakers’ power.

The Ballot Initiative Strategy Center counts 76 state bills introduced this year that would make the initiative process harder to use — often by creating tougher signature requirements or by raising the threshold for approval, the two methods used by Issue 1.

Last fall, Arizona voters approved two measures, both backed by the legislature, that restricted the initiative process. Voters rejected a third, further-reaching measure that would have rendered the process all but moot by letting lawmakers amend or repeal initiatives already passed by voters.

Arkansas this year raised the number of counties where initiative supporters must gather signatures from 15 to 50. North Dakota voters will weigh in on a measure next year that would amend the constitution by raising the threshold for initiatives to 60%.

And in 2020, Florida imposed tougher signature-gathering requirements for the initiative process — a response in part to the passage in 2018 of a measure re-enfranchising people with past convictions, which the legislature had already weakened via legislation.

Some of these efforts have failed. South Dakota voters in June 2022 rejected a bid by the legislature to raise the threshold for ballot measures to 60% — which one top lawmaker acknowledged was aimed at foiling a measure on the November ballot to expand Medicaid. (The Medicaid expansion ultimately passed with 56% of the vote.)

And in Missouri, legislation that would have required ballot initiatives to gain 57% approval passed the House but died in the Senate in May. Republicans, who control state government, have vowed to try again next year. As in Ohio, lawmakers have said they want to stop an abortion rights measure, which could be on the 2024 ballot in the state.

“There is a common thread between all these efforts,” Elena Nunez, the director of state operations at Common Cause, told reporters. “They are responses to people using the ballot measure process to address the important issues of the day — things like economic justice, democracy and voting rights, and reproductive health.”

Nunez added: “We are seeing states where the legislature is not only not doing that —?they are taking efforts to make sure that the people themselves can’t do it either.”

Abortion access?

Ohio’s Issue 1 popped up because of one reason: abortion.

When swing states started enshrining abortion access into their constitutions in the wake of the Supreme Court’s ruling striking down Roe v. Wade, Ohio reproductive-rights groups jumped on board. They organized a November ballot measure to do the same for their state.

In May, the Republicans who control the Ohio Statehouse responded by passing a joint resolution to put their own measure, Issue 1, on the ballot. As legislators voted, hundreds of protestors, including law enforcement, union workers and nurses, demonstrated outside the chambers.

The resolution called for an August special election, meaning that if Issue 1 passed, the abortion rights measure in November would need to win 60% of the vote.

That threshold could well be the difference between victory and defeat. Of the six abortion-rights ballot measures to have been held since Roe was struck down, four — those in Kentucky, Montana, Michigan, and Missouri — have passed with between 52 and 59 percent of the vote. Only in deep-blue Vermont and California did they win over 60%.

But there was one problem with lawmakers’ plan. Back in December, they had passed a bill to eliminate the vast majority of August special elections, which have an abysmal turnout rate and cost $20 million. A coalition of Issue 1 opponents filed a lawsuit in the Ohio Supreme Court challenging the August special election date, citing the recent change in law. In 1897, they noted, the Ohio Supreme Court stated that the legislature couldn’t amend statutes by passing joint resolutions.

The court’s Republican majority allowed the election to move forward, finding that the legislature could override itself to set an election date.

Proponents of Issue 1 say they want to stop wealthy special interests from coming into the state. But the effort is being bankrolled in part by Richard Uihlein — an out-of-state billionaire and a major supporter of groups that helped organize the rally on Jan. 6, 2021 that led to the deadly insurrection at the U.S. Capitol — who gave over $4 million to a pro-Issue-1 PAC Protect Our Constitution.

Newly filed campaign finance documents reveal that the PAC has raised about $4.8 million. Uihlein’s donations have been 82% of the group’s total support. But out-of-state interests aren’t just funding the vote yes side.

One Person One Vote, the anti-Issue 1 PAC, has raised more than $14.8 million, according to the filings. The largest lump sum was $1.8 million from the Tides Foundation, a progressive social advocacy charity based in California. In total, 83% of the funds raised by the vote no campaign have also been from out-of-state interests. However, these include national organizations that have chapters in Ohio, like the National Education Association.

Some of the ads run by Issue 1 supporters have been called misleading. One declares: “Out-of-state special interests that put trans ideology in classrooms and encourage sex-changes for kids are hiding behind slick ads.” Neither the abortion-rights measure nor any other potential Ohio ballot measure in the works relates to trans issues.

LaRose, too, has received criticism for campaigning energetically for Issue 1 while being responsible for overseeing the vote in an unbiased way as the state’s top elections official. In July, he also announced his campaign for the U.S. Senate, in a competitive Republican primary.

“We don’t expect, especially this close to the election, for the secretary of state to be out there as the chief cheerleader of Issue 1,” Catherine Turcer of Common Cause Ohio told News 5 recently.

A spokesperson for LaRose did not respond to a request for comment at that time.

Polling favors opponents

A Suffolk University/USA Today poll released July 20 found that 57% of registered Ohio voters oppose Issue 1, while 26% support it, with 17% undecided.

That has some Issue 1 opponents talking about triumphing by a margin large enough to make a statement to the legislature.

“I don’t want to just win this, I want to win this big,” Jaladah Aslam, an organizer with the Ohio Unity Coalition, a civil rights group, told the crowd at the Boardman rally. “I want to send a message to them to stop messing with us.”

Getting the resounding victory they want will depend on how effectively Issue 1’s opponents can mobilize their voters. By July 28, the campaign said it had knocked on over 63,000 doors and participated in more than 15,000 conversations since May.

“Overwhelmingly, folks who know about the issue are excited to vote no or they’ve already voted no,” said Tatiana Rodzos, an organizer for Ohio Citizen Action, a progressive group playing a leading role in the “No” effort.

As he went door-to-door on a recent afternoon in Westlake, a Cleveland suburb, Mike Todd found plenty of potential voters who didn’t know about the election.

“It’s kind of voter education,” said Todd, the field director for OCA. “Making sure folks are aware that there’s even an election going on in August.”

States Newsroom and News 5 followed as Todd went door-to-door on a recent afternoon in Westlake, a Cleveland suburb. Plenty of potential voters said they didn’t know much about the election.

At each door, Todd introduced himself and described the measure as a threat to majority rule that would take power away from regular Ohioans and give it to politicians. Most people promised to study the literature he left and consider the issue.

Playing a key role in the “No” campaign are progressive organizations who may look to use the initiative process to advance their issues. That means not only reproductive-rights groups, but also workers’-rights advocates pushing to raise the minimum wage, anti-gerrymandering activists who want to reform redistricting, and more.

One Fair Wage is collecting signatures for a possible 2024 ballot measure that would boost Ohio’s minimum wage to $15 an hour, from the current $10.10, by 2026. On a recent afternoon, Barry Goldberg, a canvasser for the group, was asking for signatures on a busy shopping street in Cleveland Heights, a small city just outside Cleveland.

If passers-by agreed to sign — and most registered Ohio voters did — Goldberg would then tell them about the election for Issue 1, explaining that it would make it harder to pass initiatives like the minimum-wage measure. He asked them to write their contact information on a separate sheet so that organizers could get them to the polls.

Goldberg said the current rules make it challenging enough to gather the signatures needed to get an issue on the ballot through the initiative process. In the 44 counties required, organizers must get signatures from registered voters numbering at least 5% of the county’s total vote in the last gubernatorial election.

Having to gather signatures in all 88 counties?

“That would kill nearly every ballot initiative before it started,” Goldberg said. “All it would take is someone with a million dollars who didn’t like a bill to just dump money into a handful of counties, and do everything they can to make it harder to get signatures. Something could be wildly popular, and still not even get (on the ballot).”

Making change difficult?

But Issue 1 supporters say trying to change the state’s founding documents should be difficult.

“If a constitutional issue is significant enough to impact all 11.8 million Ohioans, then it should have to garner and demonstrate broad statewide backing for consideration,” the Ohio Restaurant Association and other business groups who oppose a minimum-wage hike said in a May statement backing Issue 1.

Cirino, the Republican senator, agrees.

“The U.S. Constitution has very stiff requirements in order to make amendments,” he said. “The founding fathers designed it that way, so that the Constitution could not be changed on a willy-nilly basis.”

“Yes” campaign leaders have mostly tried to publicly downplay the role of abortion in the effort. But it wasn’t hard to find Ohioans who cited the issue to explain their support for Issue 1.

“The driving force for us to be here was the abortion issue,” said Bob Dlugos, a local voter who stopped in to the Lake County GOP headquarters with his wife to pick up a lawn sign. “I do not want abortion to go up to the date of birth,” said Dlugos. “So that 60% vote is crucial.”

In fact, the proposed abortion-rights ballot measure would allow for abortion to be banned “after fetal viability,” unless a pregnant patient’s life or health were at risk.

But Cirino said passing Issue 1 would have a positive impact beyond abortion.

“Minimum wage, recreational marijuana — there will be other things,” he said. “If organizations realize that they can easily get into the Ohio Constitution with a 50%-plus-one majority, they’re going to be flocking to the state of Ohio to get things done that way.”

And Cirino suggested that making direct democracy too easy undermines the whole idea of representative government.

“Legislators — we are all elected by the people,” he said. “We speak for the people. We are up for election every two years in the House, in the Senate every four years.

“So that gives the people an opportunity to express their views to the legislators,” Cirino continued. “And then we can act accordingly, in their best interests.”

But Issue 1 opponents say that because lawmakers have used the redistricting process to ensure they’ll stay in power, that system isn’t working.

“We’re living under gerrymandered maps,” Mia Lewis, the associate director of Common Cause Ohio, told reporters recently. “There’s super-majorities in both chambers … one party controls the Ohio Supreme Court, and all statewide elected positions. But it’s not enough. They actually want to take away the citizens’ last meaningful way to have their voices heard.”

Turnout

Although polling has favored vote no, and so has the sharp increase in absentee ballots, this election will most likely come down to one thing: voter turnout.

When it comes to Republicans, state data shows they went out to vote twice the amount as Democrats in the 2022 primary. This provides some comfort for Cirino. But Rodzos says he is in for a shock.

“It’s just really motivating to think that supporters of Issue 1, they don’t see that we can do this — but we’re going to do it,” the vote no advocate said. “The energy is there, the excitement is there and the anger is there.”

Until Aug. 8, advocates will continue knocking.

Kentuckians could no longer use one form of photo ID at the polls without also filing an affidavit under a bill that the Senate approved Tuesday. It now goes to the House. (Photo by Stephen Maturen/Getty Images)

In recent years, U.S. politics has been consumed by partisan fights over states’ election policies.

But a new study by two political scientists is causing a stir by finding that state legislators’ changes to election laws — both those that tighten election rules in the name of integrity, and those that loosen rules to expand access — have almost no impact on which side wins.

“Contemporary election reforms that are purported to increase or decrease turnout tend to have negligible effects on election outcomes,” write the authors, Justin Grimmer and Eitan Hersh, political scientists at Stanford University and Tufts University, respectively, in “How Election Rules Affect Who Wins,” which was published online as a working paper June 29.

These laws, the authors write, “have small effects on outcomes because they tend to target small shares of the electorate, have a small effect on turnout, and/or affect voters who are relatively balanced in their partisanship.”

That doesn’t mean these laws don’t matter. Many advocates, as well as the authors themselves, say there are plenty of reasons beyond partisanship to care about voting policy — not least the effect some can have on non-white voters.

“If we can take the temperature down on some of these issues and separate the partisan consequences from some of the other consequences, the public discussion would actually be a lot better,” Hersh said in a phone interview. “Right now, it seems like one of the reasons this stuff is toxic is because every minor thing, from having mail voting to having voter ID, is treated as some democracy-ending reform. And I think that’s quite dangerous.”

Indeed, Grimmer and Hersh’s conclusion, which is largely supported by other recent research, is at odds with the behavior of much of the political and advocacy worlds.

In recent years, the parties and outside groups have poured countless dollars and hours into the battles over voting, seeking to gain an electoral edge, stop their opponents from getting one, or fight voter suppression. Now, some are asking: What does the emerging consensus that these laws have minimal effects on election outcomes mean for that ongoing work?

Elections bill in House?

The study appears just as a heated debate is flaring again in Congress over the partisan and racial impact of recent voting laws.

On July 10, at a U.S. House Administration Committee field hearing in Atlanta, Republican lawmakers unveiled the American Confidence in Elections Act, new legislation that would tighten voting rules in numerous ways.

To make the case for the measure, the GOPers repeatedly criticized Democrats for predicting that Georgia’s 2021 election law, which imposed stricter rules on several types of voting, would suppress votes, especially among minorities. (“The left lied,” declared a GOP video on the issue that was shown at the hearing.)

Republicans noted that the state’s turnout in fact went up last year — though Democrats countered that Black turnout had gone down relative to white turnout.

Grimmer, a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution, served as an expert witness for Georgia in its defense of the law after the state was sued by the U.S. Department of Justice and voting-rights groups.

Meanwhile, some in the trenches of the voting wars reject the new study’s conclusions out of hand.

“Republicans are targeting the rules of voting because they know they matter,” said the Democratic super-lawyer Marc Elias — who filed the first lawsuit against the Georgia measure — in a statement to States Newsroom. “Studies of cherry-picked practices from years and decades ago may be interesting to some political scientists but they don’t solve the problem of armed vigilantes at drop boxes or states changing laws to make voter registration more difficult.”

As the conventional wisdom has it, laws that restrict access tend to help Republicans, since those most likely to be blocked or deterred by stricter rules — often racial minorities, students, renters and low-income Americans — lean Democratic. And laws that make voting easier, the idea goes, tend to boost Democrats, since the people likely to be helped by them similarly lean Democratic.

Indeed, Republican-led states have lined up to pass restrictive new voting laws, while fighting Democratic efforts to pass expansive laws. Democrats have done the reverse — including raising hundreds of millions of dollars to file court challenges to the GOP’s measures. And at election time, both sides have mobilized vast armies of volunteers to hunt for fraud, or protect voting rights, at the polls.

Politicians have been quick to blame election rules for defeats. Hillary Clinton has said, with little evidence, that between 27,000 and 200,000 Wisconsin voters “were turned away from the polls” in the 2016 presidential election because of the state’s ID requirement. Former President Donald Trump has gone much further, frequently blaming his 2020 loss on loose voting rules that, he falsely claims, enable fraud.

Advocates and much of the media have likewise prioritized the issue, seeing a chance to hold powerful actors accountable, protect or expand access to the political process, or spotlight a set of urgent challenges to U.S. democracy.

But Grimmer and Hersh describe this Sturm und Drang — at least the part that’s focused on partisan outcomes — as a tempest in a teapot.

“The caustic rhetoric that suggests the partisan stakes for election administration reform are very high is detached from empirical reality,” Grimmer and Hersh write. “Even very close elections are decided by margins larger than the magnitude of election reforms we examine in this paper.”

Little evidence of impact on results

Though that finding may surprise political operatives, advocates, and journalists, academic experts say it’s very much in sync with existing research on the issue — making the Grimmer-Hersh study much harder to dismiss as an outlier.

Scholars have struggled to find evidence that changes like early voting and election-day registration have significantly boosted turnout. (One possible exception is mail voting, where at least one recent study did find significant effects, while others didn’t.)

Nor have most studies found that even very controversial restrictive measures do much to lower voting rates. A 2019 paper released by the National Bureau of Economic Research found that strict voter ID laws “are unlikely to have a meaningful impact on turnout or election outcomes.” And a paper published this year by two Notre Dame political scientists found that ID laws “motivate and mobilize supporters of both parties, ultimately mitigating their anticipated effects on election results.”

The Grimmer-Hersh study tries to clarify why the partisan effects are so negligible. Unlike most earlier studies, it doesn’t look only at one type of law — voter ID laws, for example — but rather on the entire category of election laws that might affect turnout, including both those that make voting harder and those that make it easier.

The authors give an example of a hypothetical law that imposes additional requirements for voting, targeting Democratic-leaning groups.

The requirements target 4% of the electorate, and cause a 3 percentage-point decline in turnout among this group — figures that the authors say are consistent with the effects of real laws. The result would be a 0.12 percentage point drop in overall turnout.

That’s already small, but because that group is likely to be around 60% Democratic, not 100%, the swing toward Republicans would be even smaller, just 0.011 percentage points. Only the very closest elections in history would be affected by a swing that tiny.

Even laws that contain several prongs that affect voting in different ways are still likely to affect results only in the very tightest elections, the authors write. North Carolina’s omnibus elections bill currently moving through the legislature there is an example, though it isn’t mentioned in the study.

In one section that may raise the hackles of voting-rights advocates, the authors note that there has been no significant turnout decline in the mostly Southern states that were affected by the Supreme Court’s 2013 ruling in Shelby County v. Holder, which removed the requirement for those states to have their election changes pre-approved by the federal government, to ensure they don’t hurt minority voting. In fact, they say, voting rates among non-whites have increased since the ruling.

Advocates and journalists —?including this one! — have poured resources into documenting the slew of restrictive new rules, from voter ID laws to reductions in polling sites, that were imposed in the wake of Shelby, at times painting the onslaught as an urgent crisis of democracy.

Even far-reaching structural reforms that go beyond targeted measures like voter ID may not do much to affect election outcomes, the paper suggests.

Many predicted that the 1993 National Voter Registration Act, which has added millions to the rolls by requiring motor vehicles departments and other state agencies to offer registration, would help Democrats, the authors note. (“Who wins under this bill?” asked Rep. Spencer Bachus, an Alabama Republican, during the debate over the measure. The law, he answered, “will result in the registration of millions of welfare recipients, illegal aliens, and taxpayer-funded entitlement recipients. They’ll win.”)

In fact, the authors write, the law had essentially no partisan impact.

‘Beyond the voting wars’

Still, some critics note that many high-profile elections these days, including presidential elections, are decided by razor-thin margins. In both of the last two presidential elections, the winner won three pivotal states by 1.2 percentage points or less — in 2020, it was 0.7 percentage points or less. (And that’s leaving aside Florida 2000, a unicorn event that was so close that almost everything made a difference.)

“[U]sing the Hersh-Grimmer framework, some of these laws would’ve had a plausible chance of swinging the 2016 presidential election because the election was so close,” said Jacob Grumbach, a professor of political science at the University of Washington, via email. “ I could understand people might think that’s a big deal.”

Hersh acknowledged it’s possible that a multi-pronged law, or a set of laws acting together, could cause a swing that big. But he argued that because of the high level of uncertainty involved in the analysis, there’s no reliable way to predict what the partisan effects of a given law will be.

“Yeah, collectively these small policies could aggregate,” Hersh said. “But no one knows how they aggregate. Even the ones that liberals call suppression.”

“There’s no way lawmakers can sit around and be like, ‘OK, we’re going to do these six things and this is going to help Democrats or Republicans,’ and actually know what they’re talking about,” Hersh added.

The authors also acknowledge more than once that there are plenty of valid reasons to worry about election policies that have nothing to do with results —? “such as whether they make voting convenient, more secure, more cost effective, and whether they are motivated by discriminatory intent.” All of those effects would be important to pay attention to, even if they didn’t have a partisan impact.

In fact, both Grimmer and Hersh stressed in interviews that one goal of the paper was to encourage a focus on these other issues by making questions of partisanship recede.

?”States should be seeking out policies that they think will improve the functioning of elections,” said Grimmer. “And they can be comforted knowing that when they make those changes, it’s not going to end up with wild swings in partisan balance.”

Others see a different take-away from the paper.

David Nickerson, a political science professor at Temple University in Philadelphia, was involved in a project that looked at the impact of stadium voting, which took place in the 2020 election at over 48 professional sports stadiums as a convenience measure during the pandemic. Nickerson said project organizers hoped that when they showed stadium voting has no partisan effect, Republican officials would drop their opposition to it.

But that didn’t happen, Nickerson said. The experience suggests to him that differences over how elections should be run — and in particular over how easy or hard voting should be — are as much about ideological principle as they are about political advantage.

“You’ll even hear Republicans openly say they think voting should be harder, and you should only vote if you really want to and care and are committed — which I can’t imagine a Democratic official saying,” Nickerson said. “It’s a different worldview.”

Michael Morse, a professor at the University of Pennsylvania Carey Law School, said the study should lead advocates to focus relatively less on laws that affect the individual voting experience, like most voter ID laws, and more on structural issues, like getting more people on the voter rolls, or stopping gerrymandering.

“We have a limited amount of resources for reform,” Morse said. “The agenda for reform should be informed by this type of empirical political science.”

Indeed, the reality that election laws barely affect results is a good thing for building bipartisan coalitions for voting rights, Morse added.

“I would like the public discussion of these issues to be less partisan,” he said. “It’s the only way forward beyond the voting wars.”

Voters sit in polling booths to cast their vote on Tuesday, May 16, 2023, at St. Luke’s United Methodist Church in Lexington. (Kentucky Lantern photo by Abbey Cutrer)

This year’s state legislative sessions are almost all wrapped up. And on voting and elections policy, the headlines have largely focused on a new wave of restrictive voting laws passed in big Republican-led states like Florida, Texas, and Ohio, as well as expansive laws approved in Democratic-led states like Michigan, Minnesota, and New York.

But another development has flown under the radar — one that may be equally revealing about the priorities driving those in charge of voting policy in many states.

Eight states — Tennessee, West Virginia, Mississippi, Oklahoma, Hawaii, Arkansas, Indiana, and Alabama —? had turnout rates of below 50 percent when averaged between? the last two national elections.

Yet these states did almost nothing this year to boost turnout, according to an analysis by States Newsroom of new election laws and policies (though one, Hawaii, did make meaningful reforms in previous sessions). In fact, several moved in the opposite direction, imposing new restrictions that are likely only to make voting harder.

How Kentucky fares

• Kentucky’s voter turnout averaged 54.8% in the last two general elections. (The turnout to vote for president in 2020 was 64.8%. In 2022, it was 44.8%.)?
• Kentucky ranked 39th among states on the “cost of voting” index.
• Only four states have fewer early voting days than Kentucky’s three days — and those four states have none. (Kentucky allows “no-excuse” in-person absentee voting the Thursday, Friday and Saturday before an election.)

The three days of early voting were added in 2021 by Kentucky’s Republican legislature, which also ?allowed counties to establish voting centers where any registered voter in each county can cast a ballot.

Michon Lindstrom, communications director for Kentucky Secretary of State Michael Adams, said: “Turnout has not increased in the elections held since our administration persuaded the legislature to quadruple the number of voting days. Although we are proud to have increased voting convenience, we do not believe the number of voting days is a primary driver of voter turnout. As your article notes, Tennessee rates 50^th of 50 in turnout, yet Tennessee has two weeks of early voting, compared to three days of early voting in Kentucky.”

Because these eight states are mostly small or mid-size, and none are swing states — Hawaii is deep blue, while the rest are solidly red — their voting policies tend to attract less national attention than their larger and more competitive counterparts.

But they’re home to around 32 million people. And, by settling for feeble voting rates, they weaken U.S. democracy writ large.

Turnout rates matter for the health of a democracy, because the higher the rate of voting, the more closely the result reflects the will of the people, and the more legitimacy it carries. That’s especially true because turnout rates vary by age, race, income level, and more.

The findings highlight how inaction can be as powerful as active voter suppression. Policymakers in some of these states don’t recognize their low turnout rates as a problem: Top election officials in several have said encouraging voting isn’t their job.

U.S. turnout lags

American democracy has a turnout problem, experts on elections warn.

In the 2020 election, almost two-thirds of eligible voters cast a ballot — the highest rate in decades. Yet that still ranked the U.S. 31st out of 50 developed countries examined in a 2022 Pew Research Center study of turnout among the voting-age population — well behind places with far less robust democratic traditions like Indonesia, the Philippines, Brazil, Hungary, and Slovenia.

U.S. midterm elections have even lower voting rates. In 2022, just 46% of eligible voters turned out. And that was higher than all but one previous midterm this century.

Plenty of factors affect turnout, from the appeal of the choices on the ballot to the effectiveness of the campaigns at mobilizing their backers. But broadly speaking, states with more voter-friendly rules tend to see higher turnout than states with more restrictive rules.

In 2022, Oregon, which made voting easier than any other state that year, according to a well-regarded ranking system, had the highest turnout in the country — more than twice that of Tennessee, which ranked 38th on ease of voting.

Six of the eight states with the lowest voting rates in the States Newsroom analysis ranked 35th or lower on ease of voting as measured by a cost of voting index.

This correlation between ease of voting and turnout gives lawmakers and election officials from states with low turnout rates a clear path to starting to fix the problem: Make voting easier.

But a close look at what those eight lowest-performing states did this year shows that — with perhaps one exception — easing voting is not the path they’re pursuing.

Tennessee:?

Average turnout in last two elections: 45.4% (50th out of 50)

Ease of Voting Ranking: 38th out of 50

After a midterm election in which turnout dropped to just 31.3% — less than 1 in 3 eligible voters — the Volunteer State passed two elections bills this year, neither of which is likely to significantly affect turnout. In addition, lawmakers introduced several restrictive measures, including one, quickly withdrawn, that would have eliminated early voting in the state.

The office of Secretary of State Tre Hargett, a Republican, said it has partnered with businesses, sports teams, chambers of commerce and non-profit organizations to promote voting. It also runs outreach programs encouraging eligible high-school and college students to register to vote.

Julia Bruck, a Hargett spokesperson, attributed Tennessee’s low voting rates to a lack of competitive races.

“Competitive races drive turnout, not the referees,” Bruck said via email. “Tennessee has not seen as many competitive statewide races.”

Asked why Tennessee’s turnout lags even other states with a lack of competitive races, Bruck did not respond.

West Virginia

Average turnout in last two elections: 46.2% (49th out of 50)

Ease of Voting Ranking: 19th out of 50

The Mountaineer State passed only one elections bill this session, which isn’t likely to have a major impact on turnout. The League of Women Voters of West Virginia wrote in a February letter to lawmakers that the state’s rules present “many barriers,” and called for increased access.

“The legislature has offered no such improvements,” the group added.

West Virginia joined several other GOP-led states in withdrawing from the Electronic Registration Information Center, an interstate compact for sharing voter data, after right-wing activists accused the group, without evidence, of partisan bias. Experts have said that leaving ERIC will make it harder to maintain accurate voter rolls.

Secretary of State Mac Warner, a Republican, doesn’t appear in a hurry to boost voting in the state. Testifying before Congress in April, Warner said West Virginia has “perhaps the best balance” in the country between election access and election security, and called for an end to the federal requirement that state motor vehicle departments offer voter registration — the single most popular way for new voters to register.

In a separate appearance, Warner said it’s not his job to increase turnout. “That is a candidate, party or campaign’s job, to get out the voters,” he argued. “It’s my job to run a free, fair and clean election.”

Warner’s office did not respond to a request for comment on any efforts to increase turnout.

Mississippi

Average turnout in last two elections: 46.4% (48th out of 50)

Ease of Voting Ranking: 49th out of 50

The Magnolia State passed three elections bills this year, two of which had the effect of further restricting access (the third will likely have little impact on turnout). One makes it easier for election officials to remove voters from the rolls, while the other outlaws “ballot harvesting,” in which third parties, often local community organizations, collect absentee ballots from voters and mail or bring them to election offices. Voter advocacy groups have said the ban, which is being challenged by the ACLU as a violation of the Voting Rights Act, will make it harder for elderly voters and those with disabilities, among others, to cast a ballot.

After turnout in last year’s June primaries sank to just 11%, Secretary of State Michael Watson, a Republican, called the number “discouraging,” and led registration drives at high school and college football games and other venues.

Watson’s office did not respond to a request for comment about additional ways to boost turnout.

Oklahoma

Average turnout in last two elections: 47.7% (47th out of 50)

Ease of Voting Ranking: 35th out of 50

The Sooner State passed five elections bills this session. None appear likely to have a major impact on turnout, but one suggests an aversion to efforts to expand access: It makes it much harder for Oklahoma to join ERIC or any other interstate compact that, like ERIC, requires outreach to eligible but unregistered voters — a key factor in the decisions of some other red states to leave ERIC.

Another new law requires the state to obtain death records from the Social Security Administration, in order to identify registered voters who may have died, then work with local election officials to potentially remove them from the rolls.

Oklahoma’s Board of Elections didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment on efforts to boost turnout.

Hawaii

Average turnout in last two elections: 48.2% (46th out of 50)

Ease of Voting Ranking: 4th out of 50

The Aloha State passed only one elections bill this session, which isn’t likely to significantly affect turnout.

But Hawaii stands out from most of the other low-performing states, because in recent years it has implemented reforms, giving it an extremely voter-friendly system today. In 2019, it switched to universal mail elections, and in 2021 it passed automatic voter registration. It also offers same-day registration, in which voters can register at the polls.

Though Hawaii’s 2020 turnout rate of 55.2% was the lowest in the nation, the state also saw the biggest turnout increase compared to the previous presidential election, when turnout was just 42.5%.

That suggests the new mail-balloting system has the potential to lead to significant improvements over time. Automatic voter registration, too, has helped boost turnout in other states, but it has generally taken at least one cycle to have an impact.

Still, some election officials don’t sound eager to help with the turnaround. The chief elections administrator for Honolulu County, where over two-thirds of Hawaiians live, has said, as paraphrased by a local columnist, that “it is not up to government to inspire people to vote.”

“People vote because they are motivated or optimistic, or they are passionate about the issues or the candidates,” the administrator, Rex Quidilla, said last year.

Arkansas

Average turnout in last two elections: 48.7% (45th out of 50)

Ease of Voting Ranking: 48th out of 50

Arkansas passed 16 elections bills this session. And yet, despite the state’s third-from-botttom ranking on turnout, not one aimed to significantly expand access. In fact, taken together, they’re likely to make voting even harder.

One measure creates a criminal penalty for election officials who mail voters unsolicited absentee ballots or absentee ballot applications — something state law already barred them from doing. Another creates an “Election Integrity Unit” to investigate election crimes, and a third bans the use of drop-boxes to vote.

Still another amends the state constitution to require the secretary of state to do more to remove ineligible voters from the rolls, including creating a system to verify citizenship. And a fifth expands a ban on accepting money from outside groups to help run elections. That was an issue taken up by Republicans nationally after funds provided by an organization financed in part with a one-time donation in 2020 by Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg played a key role in ensuring that the 2020 elections ran smoothly despite the covid-19 pandemic.

Secretary of State John Thurston, a Republican, has suggested that expanding access isn’t a top priority. “You have to take ownership of your vote,” he said last year. “We do want it to be convenient, but hard to cheat. Accuracy is more important than convenience.”

Thurston’s office did not respond to a request for comment on efforts to increase turnout.

Indiana

Average turnout in last two elections: 49.1% (44th out of 50)

Ease of Voting Ranking: 36th out of 50

The Hoosier State passed two significant elections bills this year, both of which could further limit voting. One makes it harder for local governments to adopt their own election reforms without state approval — it comes after cities across the country have found innovative ways to expand voting access. The other affects the ability to vote more directly: It bars the mailing of unsolicited mail ballot applications, and requires voters requesting a mail ballot to submit additional identifying information.

Secretary of State Diego Morales, a Republican, campaigned on his support for a slew of new voting restrictions, but has backed off most of them since taking office in January.

Morales spokesperson Lindsey Eaton said via email that the secretary of state has sought and received special funding from the legislature for voter outreach, and has also provisionally received a federal grant to be used in part for voter outreach.

The office is also working with the Indiana Broadcasters Association on a public information campaign to promote voting. And Morales has announced plans to conduct voter outreach at county fairs in all 92 counties in the state.

“As the first Latino elected to a statewide office in Indiana, increasing voter turnout across the state remains a top priority for Secretary Morales,” Eaton said.

Alabama

Average turnout in last two elections: 49.8% (43rd out of 50)

Ease of Voting Ranking: 45th out of 50

The Yellowhammer State’s legislature adjourned in early June without passing any elections bills. A measure that Democrats and civil rights groups called voter suppression passed the state House but unexpectedly did not receive a vote in the Senate. The bill would have made it a crime to help a voter with an absentee ballot, though it contained exceptions for family members and some others.

Like Warner in West Virginia, Secretary of State Wes Allen, a Republican who has denied the 2020 election results, rejects the idea that he should encourage voting. Allen withdrew Alabama from ERIC on his first day in office, and explained that he did so in part because ERIC requires states to contact eligible but unregistered voters and urge them to register.

“Our job is to help give (local election staff and law enforcement) the resources they need to make sure our elections are run in the most safe, secure, and transparent way possible,” Allen said soon afterward. “Our job is not to turn people out. That is the job of the candidates — to make people excited to go to the polls.”

Allen’s office did not respond to a request for comment about efforts to increase turnout.

The U.S. Supreme Court ruling striking down Alabama's congressional maps is expected to provide a boost to other lawsuits alleging racial gerrymandering. (Photo by Al Drago/Getty Images)

A voter and his children walk into a polling location on May 16, 2023, at the Scott County Public Library in Georgetown. (Kentucky Lantern photo by Abbey Cutrer)

Should Kentucky leave too? Adams says exodus of states is making ERIC less useful.?

FRANKFORT — Count Kentucky’s Republican Secretary of State Michael Adams among the defenders of ERIC against baseless conspiratorial claims.

The database has helped Kentucky remove 320,00 ineligible voters, about half of them dead, since Adams took office more than three years ago.

But as states leave the interstate compact, Adams says, membership is becoming less useful and also more costly to Kentucky. It’s possible the “multitude of resignations over the last few months” will cause ERIC (an acronym for Electronic Registration Information Center) to dissolve.

These concerns are raised by Adams in a filing with the federal judge who in 2018 ordered Kentucky and then-Secretary of State Alison Lundergan Grimes, a Democrat, to clean up voter rolls in compliance with the National Voter Registration Act.?

U.S. District Judge Gregory Van Tatenhove ruled that due to underfunding the state was falling behind in purging ineligible voters. The judge ordered the state Board of Elections to submit a plan for improving voter registration maintenance.???

The order further specified that Kentucky should regularly use five sources of information, one of them ERIC, to identify voters who may have moved without notifying election officials.

Kentucky joined ERIC the next year.?

Now Adams is asking the judge to clarify whether his order, known as a consent decree, “requires utilization of ERIC — regardless of cost, and value — if other resources may be used effectively to identify and ultimately remove voters who should come off our rolls.”

That’s a big “if,” as the accompanying article explains.

Adams is researching alternative sources of information now provided by ERIC and discussing with election officials in other states “bilateral measures” they might take in lieu of ERIC, according to the motion for clarification.

?“While Secretary Adams has previously defended the ERIC organization and process from misinformation and conspiracy theories, political developments outside our state and outside his control draw into question the continued usefulness of ERIC to Kentucky,” says the motion.

As states leave, membership dues increase. Kentucky’s dues this year are $40,039, the filing says, projected to increase to $58,797 or, if Texas leaves as expected, $65,115.?

“ERIC, at its essence, is a great resource,” a lawyer for Adams wrote. “The more states that belong, the more effective it is for the member states to identify their voters who have moved and no longer vote in their states.”?

However, none of the states where Kentuckians most move or relocate from belong to ERIC, having just resigned or never joined, according to Adams’ motion.

The filing identifies the states where Kentuckians move most as Ohio, Indiana, Tennessee, Florida, Texas with the most relocations to Kentucky coming from Ohio, Indiana, Tennessee, Florida and Virginia.

So far this year, seven states, all Republican-led, have left the Electronic Registration Information Center, an interstate compact for sharing voter registration data, and more could follow.

Amid the exodus, some states, including Texas and Virginia, have said they plan to create their own data-sharing networks to replace ERIC.

Pledging to build a new system gives these states a way to rebut charges that leaving ERIC will make it harder for them to keep their voter rolls up to date. ERIC provides its members with what they say is invaluable and highly accurate data on voters who have moved or died.

But a close look at how ERIC was set up and how it operates suggests that building any new interstate partnership from scratch will be a major challenge, at the very least requiring significant time and resources.

Underscoring the point are previous failed efforts by states to create similar pacts: Two appear to have barely gotten off the ground, and one ultimately collapsed under the weight of its faulty data and lax security measures.

“It is possible, but very, very difficult,” said David Becker, the election administration expert who had a leading role in founding ERIC over a decade ago and now runs the nonprofit Center for Election Innovation and Research.

“A group of states could come together, and, after several years and millions of dollars of investment, create something that is almost as good as ERIC. And you’d have to wonder, why would you do that?”

More likely, it appears, is that the states quitting ERIC are simply leaving themselves without an effective system for sharing information, leading to less accurate and up-to-date voter rolls.

That will not only make it harder for election administrators to catch the rare cases of illegal voting. It also will hugely complicate their efforts to ensure smooth and well-run elections across the board — at a time when Americans’ trust in voting systems is already dangerously low.

Virginia exits

On May 11, Virginia became the most recent state to leave ERIC, echoing the same false charges of political bias spread by right-wing activists that led the other states — Florida, Ohio, West Virginia, Iowa, Missouri, and Alabama — to depart earlier this year (Louisiana left last year). Some of these states also balked at ERIC’s mandate that they reach out to eligible voters and encourage them to register.

But Virginia officials emphasized that they were not giving up on the idea of an interstate data-sharing compact. Getting voter registration information from other states can allow election officials to identify voters who may have moved out of state, and, after fully verifying their identities, remove them from the rolls.

“We will pursue other information arrangements with our neighboring states and look to other opportunities to partner with states in an apolitical fashion,” Virginia Elections Commissioner Susan Beals wrote in a letter informing ERIC of the state’s decision.

Asked about the effort, the Virginia Department of Elections responded with a statement: “Virginia has been participating in talks with other states for several months about creating new state-to-state data-sharing relationships for the purpose of identifying potential double voters.”

A spokesperson declined to answer a list of detailed questions about how the program might work.

Texas is working on similar plans. The state is required by law to participate in a data-sharing program with other states, and it’s currently still an ERIC member.

But in March, the secretary of state’s office announced it was shifting its long-time elections director into a new post to create an alternative inter-state system. And a bill to withdraw from ERIC and have the state build its own new system, or contract with a private-sector firm for $100,000 or less, received final approval from Texas lawmakers last week.

Sen. Bryan Hughes, the author of the bill, said in early May that the new system could be in place by Sept. 1, when his measure would go into effect if passed.

“We are actively researching options for a crosscheck system right now,” Alicia Pierce, a spokesperson for the Texas secretary of state’s office said via email.

Pierce declined to answer a list of detailed questions about how the program might work.

A spokesman for Hughes did not respond to a request for comment on the program.

But given the enormous data and security challenges that went into the creation of ERIC — which was conceived in 2009 but wasn’t up and running until three years later —? it appears doubtful that building a system that provides states with comparably useful voter information can be done on anything close to Hughes’ timeline and as cheaply as the measure requires, if it can be done at all.

First, experts say, any useful data-sharing system needs to include records from state motor vehicle departments, because that data includes identifiers that don’t typically appear on voter-registration records, including a person’s full birthdate, their driver’s license number, the last four digits of their Social Security number, and more.

Without that level of detail, attempts to match records will produce an extremely high rate of false positives, because lots of people have the same first name, last name, and birthday. (Sen. Rick Scott of Florida was purged from the rolls in 2006 after election administrators wrongly concluded he had died, thanks to exactly this error.)

But, because of privacy concerns, states protect motor vehicles department data very closely. ERIC only was able to get access to it after establishing an extensive set of cybersecurity protocols that experts say would be difficult to replicate, including double one-way hashing — essentially, a code to disguise sensitive data in case of a hack — and secure, dedicated domestic servers.

Then, there’s the problem of how to use the data.

With so many different identifiers, finding a potential match involves comparing multiple records, then conducting a sophisticated statistical analysis to determine the probability that the records actually belong to the same person.

ERIC’s system was developed by Jeff Jonas, one of the world’s leading data scientists, and a former IBM Fellow — a title the company calls its “pre-eminent technical distinction,” given to “the best and brightest of our best and brightest.”

Finally, there’s the need to attract red, blue, and purple states as members. Any system that only has one will be far less effective, because the number of states with which it can share data will be limited.

With this in mind, ERIC’s founders consciously included rules to appeal to both sides.

For red states concerned about election integrity, ERIC provided data that could help officials pare their rolls of ineligible voters. And for blue states concerned about expanding access, ERIC offered something else: A way to identify a state’s pool of eligible but unregistered voters, and a requirement that the state contact these potential voters and urge them to register. (This was the requirement that played a role in the recent departures of several red states — suggesting that the balance that ERIC sought to strike may be hard to maintain in an era when some red-state officials openly disdain efforts to expand access.)

In addition, ERIC’s board and executive committee are always bipartisan, and its chair alternates each year between election directors from a red state and a blue state.

The bottom line: Replicating what ERIC built would be a major technical, scientific, administrative and political challenge, even for a state committed to making it work.

“It’s really hard to stand up (a new system) on your own,” said Becker. “Because, one, you probably can’t get the data you need, and two, you’re probably not going to be able to afford to take the time to build the governance structure and technology that you need to make use of that data.”

A cautionary tale

An example already exists of what’s likely to happen if organizers of an interstate data-sharing system are unable or unwilling to invest the time and care needed to make it work effectively.

In 2005, Kansas election officials, working with their counterparts in Iowa, Nebraska, and Missouri, created the Interstate Voter Registration Crosscheck, often called Crosscheck, to help identify voters who were registered in multiple states.

When Kris Kobach became Kansas secretary of state in 2011, he expanded the program, and by 2014 it had 29 members.

But Crosscheck’s approach was badly flawed. The program didn’t require motor vehicles department data, and it flagged voter registrations as potential duplicates if the first name, last name, and birthdate all matched, inevitably producing huge numbers of false positives. States then had to wade through reams of Crosscheck data to weed these out.

“Crosscheck data is prone to false positives since the initial matching is only conducted using first name, last name, and date of birth,” Virginia election administrators reported in 2015. “The need to greatly refine and analyze Crosscheck data has required significant (elections) staff resources.”

In some cases, states failed to identify false positives sent by Crosscheck, and removed large numbers of eligible voters from the rolls.

There were also reports that raised questions about Crosscheck’s handling of private voter data. A 2018 lawsuit filed by the ACLU charged that Crosscheck’s lax security measures had violated voters’ right to privacy. As part of a settlement the following year, the program was shuttered. It hasn’t been in operation since.

More failed efforts

With Crosscheck offline, some of its members began exploring other ways to share data.

In 2020, Indiana passed a bill that allowed the state to formally withdraw from Crosscheck. But because state officials were reluctant to join ERIC — already Republicans had begun to falsely suggest the group was biased against them — the measure called for the creation of the Indiana Data Enhancement Association, or IDEA, a new system in which Indiana would partner with its neighbors to share data.

IDEA never got off the ground. All four of Indiana’s neighbors — Illinois, Kentucky, Ohio, and Michigan — were at the time ERIC members (Ohio was among the states that left this year), making it unlikely that they would have been interested in joining a new compact.

There are also signs that the bill’s drafters lacked expertise in data-matching. IDEA treats it as partial evidence that a voter is registered in multiple states if their driver’s license number or address matches with another state’s records. But experts say another state’s data would never include Indiana driver’s license numbers, which are closely protected, or Indiana addresses.

In August 2020, a federal judge ruled that Indiana’s procedure for removing voters from the rolls violated federal voting law by failing to give voters sufficient notice before removal. Since IDEA would have used the same procedure, the ruling, which was upheld on appeal the following year, effectively blocked the program from moving forward.

“We would have no problem with the state setting up something that followed federal law and somehow getting a bunch of other states to go along with it,” said Julia Vaughn, the executive director of Common Cause Indiana, which brought the lawsuit against the state. “But good luck doing that with one individual state with no real expertise in this, and no reputation as some entity that other states should trust their voter registration lists with.”

Asked about the short-lived effort, Lindsey Eaton, a spokesperson for the Indiana secretary of state’s office, didn’t respond directly.

“IDEA never launched in Indiana,” Eaton said via email.

The author of the bill that created IDEA, Sen. Greg Walker, did not respond to an inquiry about efforts to launch the program. His staff said he was on vacation.

New Hampshire election officials confronted the same issue with Crosscheck’s demise. A large share of the Granite State’s population has relocated from neighboring states, making an interstate system especially useful there.

Again, there was reluctance to join ERIC, despite a push for it from some lawmakers. At a 2019 hearing, Deputy Secretary of State David Scanlan, today the secretary of state, raised the idea of New Hampshire instead creating its own program to collaborate with other states.

Scanlan’s boss at the time, then-Secretary of State Bill Gardner, suggested New Hampshire could team up with Massachusetts and Maine to find voters who are double registered.

“We could get states to come together,” Gardner said. “It appears it’s the only option.”

That never panned out. Maine joined ERIC in 2021, and Massachusetts followed last year.

Asked whether New Hampshire ever tried to create a new system, Anna Sventek, a spokesperson for the secretary of state’s office, did not respond directly.

“Nothing is in the works,” Sventek said via email, adding that the state would still be interested in joining such a system “should the opportunity arise.”

Whitney Downard contributed to this report.

The efforts come at a time when the youth vote has been surging. (Klaus Vedfelt/Getty Images)

A top Republican election lawyer recently caused a stir when she told GOP donors that the party should work to make it harder for college students to vote in key states.

But the comments from Cleta Mitchell, who worked closely with then-President Donald Trump to try to overturn the 2020 election, are perhaps less surprising than they seem.?

They follow numerous efforts in recent years by Republican lawmakers across the country to restrict voting by college students, a group that leans Democratic. And they come at a time when the youth vote has been surging.

At an April 15 retreat for donors to the Republican National Committee, Mitchell, a leader in the broader conservative push to impose new voting restrictions, called on her party to find ways to tighten the rules for student voting in several battleground states.

Mitchell’s comments were first posted online by the independent progressive journalist Lauren Windsor.

With Republicans now enjoying veto-proof majorities in both of North Carolina’s chambers, Mitchell said, the party has a chance to crack down on voting by students there.?

“We need to be looking at, what are these college campus locations and polling, what is this young people effort that [Democrats] do?” said Mitchell. “They basically put the polling place next to the student dorm, so they just have to roll out of bed, vote, and go back to bed.”?

“And we need to build strong election integrity task forces in those counties,” Mitchell added, naming Durham, Wake, and Mecklenburg counties — all of which are Democratic strongholds and are home to large colleges.

Wisconsin ‘is a big problem’

The Election Integrity Network, which Mitchell chairs, works to build what it calls Election Integrity Task Forces, in which volunteers aim to root out fraud and illegal voting.

Mitchell also lamented that in Wisconsin and Michigan, both of which offer same-day voter registration, polling sites are located on campuses, making it easy for students to register and vote in one trip.?

“So they’ve registered them in one line, and then they vote them in the second line,” Mitchell said.

“Wisconsin is a big problem, because of the polling locations on college campuses,” Mitchell continued. “Their goal for the Supreme Court race was to turn out 240,000 college students in that Supreme Court race. And we don’t have anything like that, and we need to figure out how to do that, and how to combat that.”

The recent race for a seat on Wisconsin’s Supreme Court, which was won by the liberal candidate backed by Democrats, saw record campus turnout.

Mitchell also brought up New Hampshire, which has a higher share of college students than any other state, as well as statewide elections that are often decided by just a few thousand votes, The Granite State has seen a series of efforts in recent years to impose stricter rules for student voting, despite no evidence of illegal voting by students.?

“I just talked to Governor Sununu, and asked him about the college student voting issue that has been a problem,” Mitchell said, referring to the state’s Republican governor, Chris Sununu.?

“He thinks it’s fixed. We just need to have an active task force to make sure it’s fixed, and do our look back about whether or not they did go back and make sure those college students who presented, who said they were residents, really were.”

Finally, Mitchell falsely claimed that, thanks to President Joe Biden, people who apply for federal student loan aid are required to fill out a voter registration form.?

A White House executive order does urge federal agencies, including the Department of Education, to offer voter registration opportunities. But no one is required to register.

Banning student IDs for voting

Mitchell’s remarks weren’t focused only on student voting.?

She also declared that if Republicans win full control of Virginia state government this year, they should eliminate early voting and same-day registration in the state. And she said that any group “that’s got democracy in their name — those are not friends of ours.”

But the comments about voting by college students deserve particular scrutiny because of an ongoing multi-state push to tighten the rules for student voters — including by banning student IDs for voting.?

Mike Burns, the national director for the Campus Vote Project, which works as an arm of the nonpartisan Fair Elections Center to expand access to voting for college students, said the tens of millions of students enrolled in higher education across the country already face a unique set of hurdles in casting a ballot: They’re less likely than other voters to have a driver’s license or utility bill to use as ID; they’re less likely to have a car to get to an off-campus polling site; and they often move each year, requiring them to go through the registration process anew each time.

Few states, Burns added, design their election systems to address these challenges. Despite Mitchell’s fear about students rolling out of bed to vote, a 2022 Duke University study that looked at 35 states found that nearly three quarters of colleges did not have voting sites on campus.

Given this backdrop, “it’s just that much more exasperating,” Burns said, “to hear someone talk about intentionally trying to make that even harder, and to do it for political reasons.”?

Surging youth vote

The issue of student voting has flared lately thanks to a recent surge in the youth vote. The midterm elections of 2018 and 2022 saw the two highest turnout rates for voters under 30 in the last three decades. And in 2020, half of all eligible voters under 30 turned out, a stunning 11-point increase from 2016.?

In 2018, those voters went for Democratic candidates by a 49-point margin, and in 2020 they went for Biden over Trump by 24 points — making them easily the most Democratic-leaning age group in both years.

That’s spurred Republican legislators to take action. This year alone, three GOP-controlled states — Missouri, Montana, and Idaho — have tightened their voter ID laws to remove student IDs from the list of documents voters can use to prove their identity.?

Montana’s law was struck down as a violation of the state constitution. Idaho’s is being challenged in court by voting rights groups.

One of the Idaho bill’s backers, state Rep. Tina Lambert, said she was concerned that students from neighboring Oregon or Washington might use their student IDs to vote in Idaho, then also vote in their home state. In fact, there has not been a single instance of fraud linked to student IDs in the state.

Idaho saw a 66% increase in registration by 18- and 19-year-olds between November 2018 and September 2022, by far the highest in the country, a Tufts University study found.?

A fourth state, Ohio, passed a strict voter ID law with a similar impact. Ohio doesn’t allow student IDs for voting, but previously it did allow utility bills. So colleges would issue students zero-dollar utility bills to be used for voter ID purposes. The new law, which is also being challenged in court, eliminates that option by requiring a photo ID.

In Texas, where growing numbers of young and non-white voters threaten to upend the state’s politics, one Republican bill introduced this session would ban polling places on college campuses. The bill’s sponsor, state Rep. Carrie Isaac, has described it as a safety measure aimed at keeping outsiders off campus, since campus polling places also serve the wider voting public.

Voter advocates charged in a lawsuit that a 2021 Texas law establishing strict residency requirements would particularly burden college students, by preventing them from registering at their prior home address when they temporarily move away for college. A federal judge last year struck down much of the law, but the decision was reversed on appeal.

‘They just vote their feelings’

Efforts to make it difficult for students and other young people to vote are almost as old as the 26th Amendment, which went into effect in 1971, enfranchising Americans aged 18 to 20.?

In one Texas county with a large, historically Black university, the chief voting official responded to the measure by requiring students to answer questions about their employment status and property ownership, before being stopped by a federal court in a key ruling for student voting rights.

Following the Supreme Court’s 2013 decision weakening the Voting Rights Act, Texas imposed a voter ID law that didn’t allow student IDs, even those from state universities, though it did include handgun licenses. And North Carolina passed a sweeping 2013 voting law that, among other steps, ended pre-registration of high-school students.?

Two years earlier, Wisconsin passed a voter ID law that does allow student IDs from state universities, but mandates that the ID have an expiration date and have been issued within the last two years — requirements that many student IDs don’t meet. Though some colleges have created special voter IDs, advocates say the issue still generates significant confusion among students.

New Hampshire has often been a hotspot for efforts to restrict student voting. Backers of these efforts have at times argued that students don’t have as much stake in the community as other voters, since they might not stick around after college.

A 2021 bill that died in committee would have barred students from using their campus address to register. “People who go to college in New Hampshire, unless they are really bona fide permanent residents … should vote by absentee ballot in their home states,” the bill’s sponsor, Rep. Norman Silver, told Stateline. “It’s a matter of simple equity.”

Back in 2011, Rep. William O’Brien, then the House speaker and advocating for a bill to tighten residency requirements, was even blunter.?

“They go into these general elections, they’ll have 900 same-day registrations, which are the kids coming out of the schools and basically doing what I did when I was a kid, which is voting as a liberal,” O’Brien said. “That’s what kids do. They don’t have life experience, and they just vote their feelings and they’re taking away the towns’ ability to govern themselves. It’s not fair.”

Burns, of the Campus Vote Project, said that kind of sentiment not only runs counter not only to the purpose of the 26th Amendment, but to any notion of voting as a civic good.?

This is a formative process,” said Burns. “We know from research that if people start to vote at a younger age, they will stay involved. It puts them on a trajectory of being more involved in civic life for the rest of their life, and I think that’s a good thing.”

“Every community is better when more people have their voices heard. And that includes young people,” Burns added. “So regardless of who someone’s going to vote for, we think they should have equal access.”

(Getty Images)

(Getty Images)