Votebeat

Prediction markets place odds on election results. Officials say they could erode public trust.

2026-08-10T09:00:00+00:00

Votebeat is a nonprofit news organization reporting on voting access and election administration across the U.S.

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A 2004 paper on the history of presidential election betting markets kicks off with a partial quote from the transcendentalist Henry David Thoreau’s 19th-century essay “Civil Disobedience”: “All voting is a sort of gaming, like checkers or backgammon, with a slight moral tinge to it, a playing with right and wrong, with moral questions; and betting naturally accompanies it.”

Not everyone agrees with that last part. And the rapid rise of online prediction markets such as Kalshi and Polymarket are bringing that tension to the fore.

Prediction markets are websites that sell contracts that allow users to wager on event outcomes. Political examples could include which party will control the U.S. House or Senate after the midterms, for example. Typically, there are fixed payouts and the price of the contract reflects the market’s expectation of the odds of the outcome.

It isn’t yet entirely clear who regulates prediction markets and how, and markets have regularly clashed with state officials trying to rein them in. When it comes to elections, most states have laws prohibiting election betting in some form or fashion, according to a Pew Research Center analysis released in June. But many such laws predate modern prediction markets and haven’t necessarily been tested in court recently.

Kalshi recently pushed back on Wisconsin election officials after they issued an advisory about a state law dating back to the 19th century that says voters can’t cast ballots in races they’ve bet on. A Kalshi staffer said on social media the Wisconsin advisory meant election officials were engaged in “active voter suppression.”

However the legal situation shakes out, betting on elections is happening. An NBC News analysis found nearly $200 million in trading volume on midterm election outcomes on prediction markets Kalshi and Polymarket, and election officials say they are concerned about how the odds on such sites could influence public trust in election outcomes — particularly when election results differ from those the markets had favored — and about creating incentives for manipulation.

“I think it is something that we are going to have to wrestle with going into the November election and forward,” said Dean Logan, the registrar-recorder and county clerk for Los Angeles County, California, the country’s single most populous election jurisdiction, during a webinar organized by the Partnership for Large Election Jurisdictions this month.

Logan said in the Los Angeles mayoral primary in June, “early election returns differed from market expectations, and that resulted in suspicion and questioning of normal ballot processing and canvassing procedures in California.” The bottom line, he said, is that “elections administration right now is very much affected by perception and misinformation, and in our field we have to be prepared to respond to that.”

‘This is all bad’

Prediction markets say their odds reflect the wisdom of the crowds and can be more accurate than polling. And these markets have been pretty good at predicting elections in the past. For example, the 2004 paper that quoted Thoreau, by economics professors Paul Rhode and Koleman Strumpf, analyzed data on election gambling between 1868 and 1940 and found that the historical markets “did a remarkable job forecasting elections in an era before scientific polling.”

But prediction markets differ from polls in important ways. Polls are representative samples of just the voters who live in the state or district in question; prediction markets are open to anyone, and the more money a person bets, the more influence they have on the odds.

And election officials, already worried about low public trust in elections, are concerned the odds on these markets could be manipulated to influence public perception of a contest or create new financial incentives to shape outcomes. Kalshi and Polymarket did not respond to requests for comment.

Jim Allen, the elections director of Delaware County, Pennsylvania, which had already banned election workers from directly betting on elections, earlier this year added a ban on using prediction markets to do so. He likened it to referees betting on the outcome of a basketball game.

The new language, he said during the PLEJ webinar, “kicked off a conversation at our poll worker training. There was one person out of 383 precincts, one person who stood up and they said, ‘Well, what if we just want to make a minor bet on what turnout will be? That’ll keep things interesting.’ And we said, ‘No, this is all bad.’”

Carrie Levine is Votebeat’s editor-in-chief and is based in Washington, D.C. Contact Carrie at clevine@votebeat.org.

USPS proposal to carry out Trump’s executive order could create new barriers to mail voting

2026-05-29T23:25:16+00:00

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The U.S. Postal Service proposed new rules Friday that detail in part how the Trump administration intends to carry out its contested mail-ballot executive order — revealing a plan that, if it survives legal challenges, would create new barriers for mail voting and new burdens for election officials.

Under the proposal, all states would be required to send the federal government a list of all registered voters to which they are sending mail-in and absentee ballots in key federal elections. The proposal appears to give the postal service new power to block delivery of ballots to people that are not on the list and allow the agency to refuse delivery of ballots that do not meet new federal standards outlined in the proposed rule.

Jennifer Morrell, CEO of The Elections Group and a former Colorado election administrator, said that the proposal would create onerous new regulations that could be difficult and costly for local elections officials to follow, especially in rural counties which do not currently have the technology to produce the required barcodes. Such systems cost thousands of dollars.

Morrell said the rules represent an unnecessarily broad attempt to crack down on extremely rare examples of voter fraud.

“This proposal would fundamentally change the rules to address a problem that is extraordinarily rare,” she said. “This is adding significant complexity and new administrative burdens that can add additional costs with little-to-no evidence the current system is failing.”

Release of the proposed rules created widespread confusion among local elections officials unsure how they would work, and sparked broad condemnation from voting rights advocates and Democratic leaders who accused the Trump administration of trying to take unconstitutional steps to deny Americans their right to vote.

“Tens of millions of eligible voters could be prevented from voting by mail if states do not fully submit to this new federal mandate being rushed ahead of the 2026 election,” said U.S. Sen. Alex Padilla, a Democrat who previously served as California’s secretary of state. “Serious and consequential questions remain over how this new list will work with the Trump Administration’s ongoing illegal effort to create a national voter list.”

Friday’s proposed regulations, which require a 30-day comment period before moving forward, are the latest step by the Trump administration to overhaul election rules and impose unprecedented new federal oversight on the voting process.

Since returning to the White House last year, President Donald Trump has directed his administration to take sweeping new steps to alter an election system he has accused, without evidence, of cheating him out of the 2020 election. The Federal Bureau of Investigation in January seized ballots in Fulton County, Georgia as part of a probe of the 2020 election. He has issued two executive orders that attempt to assert broad presidential control over elections, though the Constitution gives authority over elections to the states and Congress. Both orders were quickly challenged in the courts, which froze major provisions of the first order, ruling the president exceeded his authority.

Release of the rules came one day after federal judge refused to block the most recent executive order on mail-in ballots because the Postal Service had not yet released its proposed new regulations. Another challenge to the order is pending in Boston, where a federal judge is scheduled to hear arguments June 2 in cases brought by voting-rights groups and a coalition of states.

Counties face steep compliance questions

Local election officials and experts said the proposal raised urgent operational questions about whether existing ballot envelopes comply with the new standards, whether counties and vendors can produce unique barcodes for outgoing and return ballots, and whether USPS could reject ballot mailings if voter data is missing, late, or mismatched.

“I don’t know how the states would potentially interpret what they need to do in order to comply, and what happens if the state doesn’t?” said Tammy Patrick, chief programs officer for the Election Center, which represents state and local election officials. “Does that mean the postal service will reject the ballots? I don’t think so. The postal service will deliver any mail provided to them so what happens if a state doesn’t do it?”

In addition, Patrick added, “I haven’t seen much here that is giving me much confidence this can be done by the fall without creating a lot of confusion and potential chaos.”

Patrick said many of the Postal Service’s proposed standards are best election-mail practices, many of which she worked on for years. But turning them into federal mandates could collide with state laws and leave local officials with no clear way — or funding — to comply.

“Some of these things are actually really good,” Patrick said, though election officials have been unable to adopt them in the past, and there’s no funding in the executive order to help.“Who is going to pay for it?”

Kathy Boockvar, a former Pennsylvania secretary of state, said implementing the changes before the 2026 midterms would place another burden on election officials who are already underfunded and understaffed.

“Especially in situations like this, where there is no funding being provided and no time for election officials and voters to absorb the required changes, this means that voters will bear the brunt of a poorly planned, last minute attempt to upend electoral processes,” said Boockvar, a Democrat. “You can’t just snap your fingers and change how elections are run overnight.”

A technical rule with major implications

Among the most concerning pieces of the 20-page proposal, voting rights advocates and election officials said, is a new requirement that every ballot envelope — both the one sent to the voter and the one used to return the ballot — carry a unique Postal Service barcode.

Election officials would have to send those barcodes to USPS along with voters’ names and addresses, allowing the agency to check whether outbound ballot mailings match the state-submitted list before accepting them. The postal service said the new rules wouldn’t apply to primary elections or to military and overseas ballots, but critics said it could force some jurisdictions to redesign envelopes, update vendor contracts, and build new ballot-tracking systems before the next federal election in November.

That could be difficult. For example, Thad Hall, the election director in Pennsylvania’s Mercer County, said that while some of his outgoing mail envelopes have intelligent barcodes, not all do. Officials in other Pennsylvania counties have in the past said their vendors do not use intelligent barcodes.

Gideon Cohn-Postar, director of federal affairs at the Institute for Responsive Government, a nonpartisan think tank, characterized the proposal as a confusing attempt to comply with Trump’s recent executive order.

“The executive order they are trying to fulfill is incoherent in and of itself,” he said.

Cohn-Postar said the proposals could have the biggest impact on small jurisdictions that may not have the funding to comply. In a small jurisdiction of about 2,500 voters, ordering new envelopes costs about $10,000 — a significant expense that requires them to learn entirely new technology.

For those jurisdictions, he said, the proposal could be a “big change.”

“Right now, in the heat of the midterm election cycle, election officials should be given the space and resources to focus on critical work like improving cyber and physical security,” he said. “More bureaucracy only pulls them away from those mission-critical priorities.”

Correction, May 29: An earlier version of this story incorrectly attributed a quotation to Mercer County Election Director Thad Hall.

Dion Nissenbaum is Votebeat’s senior national reporter and is based in Houston. Contact Dion at dnissenbaum@votebeat.org.

Judge strikes down rule requiring counties to aid voters who go to wrong polling place

2026-05-02T01:06:36+00:00

Votebeat is a nonprofit news organization reporting on voting access and election administration across the U.S. Sign up for Votebeat Arizona’s free newsletter here.

Arizona Secretary of State Adrian Fontes can’t force election officials to provide a way for voters who show up at the wrong polling place to cast a valid ballot, according to a new court decision striking down a key provision of the state’s election rulebook.

In 2023, Fontes wrote a policy into the state’s election procedures manual directing counties that assign voters to polling places to allow out-of-precinct voters to cast their ballots on accessible voting devices, which state and federal law requires must be available at every polling place for voters with disabilities. Before that, voters had no way to cast a valid ballot if they showed up at the wrong polling location.

Weeks before the 2024 election, Fontes, a Democrat, sued Pinal County, a bright-red jurisdiction sandwiched between Phoenix and Tucson, for failing to comply with the new policy. A Pinal County Superior Court judge ruled that the county was violating state law by not following the rule, but declined to force it to comply in that election. Later, the Arizona Supreme Court similarly ruled that it was far too close to the election to compel the county to change course. Since then, the two sides have continued to fight the issue in court.

In Friday’s decision, Maricopa County Superior Court Judge Scott Blaney ruled that the policy usurped counties’ authority and threatened to disenfranchise disabled voters, who may be forced to wait in line to use an accessible machine. He noted it would place administrative burdens on local election officials, requiring them to “substantially rework” poll workers’ training and load all of the county’s ballot styles onto its accessible voting devices. He also found that precinct-based voting was not a form of disenfranchisement.

“Requiring a person to identify their polling place and then travel there does not deprive anyone of the right to vote — this is, in fact, a ‘usual burden of voting,’” he wrote, citing prior case law.

Pinal is one of two counties in the state that assigns voters to polling places based on their precinct. Nine other counties in the state use vote centers, which allow voters to cast their ballots at any polling location within county limits. The state’s four remaining counties use a hybrid model that combines vote centers with precinct-based voting locations. The ruling applies to all counties that use precinct-based polling places.

Calli Jones, a spokesperson for Fontes, called Blaney’s decision “disappointing.” She said the ruling would “make it harder for voters with a disability to vote in Pinal County than in any other county in Arizona.”

“However, while our office looks to our next steps, we recognize that this ruling affects only one very small provision in a manual that gives the counties very clear guidance on election administration issues,” she said, adding that the rulebook would serve as a “sound guiding light as we head into the election season.”

In Pinal County, officials celebrated the decision. Board of Supervisors Chair Jeffrey McClure said in a statement that the issue was “a matter of principle.”

“Pinal County has always utilized the precinct-based voting model, and our voters tell us they want to keep it that way, primarily for reasons of security and control,” he said. “State statutes are very clear — it’s only the Board of Supervisors that has the authority to move to a voting center model, which is effectively what this provision was.”

Pinal County Recorder Dana Lewis said the ruling was an important victory for local election control.

“Voters, through their locally elected leaders, retain the right to make these decisions,” she said. “That right is not erased by administrative overreach, no matter how ambitious the effort.”

Sasha Hupka is a reporter for Votebeat based in Arizona. Contact Sasha at shupka@votebeat.org.

Arizona’s Cochise County, known for election turmoil, may challenge state laws again ahead of 2026

2025-09-04T09:00:00+00:00

When the Cochise County supervisors sat down to talk about elections in August, they were well aware of what happened the last time the county’s leaders tried to test the limits of state law.

The rural Arizona county on the Mexican border is where, during the 2022 midterm election, two Republicans on the Board of Supervisors devised a plan to ditch the machines used for elections and instead hand-count votes, before a judge foiled their plan. They then delayed the vote to finalize the county’s results until the same judge ordered them to certify them.

Supervisor Tom Crosby, who was re-elected last year, is awaiting a criminal trial on charges related to his actions during that election. And the county’s two new supervisors, also both Republicans, know his story well, and have been warned by the secretary of state about the election rules they must follow.

Nonetheless, at an Aug. 5 meeting, Supervisor Frank Antenori said the board needs to test the state’s laws once again, to see if supervisors really are obligated to use machines to tally votes, and whether they really have a non-discretionary duty to certify results. And Supervisor Kathleen Gomez said that if she had been in office in 2024, she wouldn’t have certified the county’s election results because of problems that occurred while counting ballots.

“I think we have to put this back in play in the courts,” Antenori said about supervisors’ duty to certify elections. “We have to make a case to go fight this again, or get the Legislature to change the statute.”

With another midterm election nearing, the supervisors are all but vowing to test the boundaries of state election laws that are meant to ensure accurate, secure, and timely election results. Hand-counting ballots has been proven in multiple studies and trials to be less accurate and take more time. And certification deadlines, if breached, could disrupt the transfer of power at all levels of government, from local to federal offices.

The false claims of election fraud have slowed in Arizona since Donald Trump won the presidential election last year, but the conversation among the supervisors last month, and several others earlier this year, are an indication of how Trump’s prior claims continue to influence how Arizona’s elections are perceived and run, and how they could lead to future challenges to results in 2026 and beyond.

Secretary of State Adrian Fontes, a Democrat, was invited to present at the supervisors’ August meeting, but didn’t go after seeing he was being asked to present alongside someone who had encouraged the supervisors in 2022 to block the certification of the midterm results, according to documents obtained by Votebeat through a public records request.

After the meeting, his communications director, Aaron Thacker, told Votebeat that there is no debate about what the law requires the supervisors to do. And he said that the repeated attempts to question certified election systems in Arizona, particularly in smaller counties, “do more to undermine public confidence than to address any real issue.”

Hearing 2022 claims repeated at supervisors meeting

The goal of the August meeting, Antenori wrote in his invitation to Fontes, was to “ensure transparency, build voter confidence, and evaluate the proper processes for verifying machine integrity.”

The other invited speaker was Paul Rice, a Phoenix resident with no formal experience in elections but who was previously involved in a court case challenging the state’s use of the machines that tally votes, including ballot-marking devices and tabulators. Rice has been lobbying Cochise supervisors to get rid of the machines since 2022.

His major claim is that the laboratories that certified the state’s voting systems in the leadup to the 2022 election were not properly accredited. That claim is part of what Crosby and former Supervisor Peggy Judd said prompted their hesitation over certification.

At the time, then-Secretary of State Katie Hobbs sent the supervisors an explanation from the U.S. Election Assistance Commission about how the labs were properly accredited. But supervisors still delayed their vote, demanding to hear from Rice and Hobbs in person. That never happened, and the judge forced them to certify before the state’s deadline.

Rice accepted the invitation to the August meeting and talked for about 45 minutes, without other public comment allowed or any rebuttal from the County Attorney’s Office. He repeated his claim about the lab accreditation, and said he didn’t believe the county had to use the machines. He also said the law on certification wasn’t clear.

Rice repeated an argument that Crosby has attempted to make in his criminal case: that state law mandates that supervisors “canvass” results, but does mandate that they “certify” them. He said he believes canvassing just means reviewing the vote totals — not signing off on them.

Thacker, Fontes’ spokesman, disputed Rice’s claims in a response to Votebeat. He pointed to a sentence in state law that says electronic tabulation equipment must be used to count ballots. And he said that courts have made it clear that the only authorized hand count under state law is a post-election audit, which examines votes cast on a limited number of ballots.

On canvassing vs. certifying, Thacker said Rice’s claim is semantic and there is no legitimate debate about it.

“In Arizona law, the canvass is the process by which the election results are reviewed and officially confirmed — it is the act of certification,” Thacker wrote in an email.

Ali Morse, a Cochise County resident who helped lead a response in opposition to the supervisors’ 2022 actions, said she experienced déjà vu watching Rice’s presentation.

“The Board’s work session, in fact, appeared to be an attempt to amplify Supervisor Crosby’s dubious justification for unlawfully refusing to certify/canvass our 2022 general election which catapulted Crosby into his current mess of legal and financial problems,” Morse wrote in a letter to the editor published in a local paper, The Herald Review.

Jenny Guzman, program director of Common Cause Arizona said the misinformation given at the meeting is dangerous.

“It’s really important for people in government, especially county supervisors and people in other elected offices, to really remember that sometimes they are the only line of communication to voters,” Guzman said. “They need to make sure they aren’t providing any sort of information that isn’t accurate.”

New supervisors preparing to hand count ballots

The conversation was the latest in a long string of attempts by the new supervisors to signal to constituents who are concerned about election integrity that they are listening.

In a February conversation about elections, the supervisors said they eventually want to get to a place where they can hand count ballots. That means first going back to precinct-style voting, where voters can vote only in their precinct, rather than anywhere in the county, they said.

And Antenori said that he would like to make the plan ahead of an election, so that supervisors can get the legal battle with the state out of the way beforehand. Otherwise, he said, “I think we are fighting with two feet in the grave.”

After that discussion, Fontes sent the supervisors a letter warning them against it, saying the only hand count allowed is the statutorily prescribed review of ballots, which specifies how many ballots should be reviewed. “Manual tabulation of ballots outside of this prescribed sample audit, whether in addition to, or in lieu of using electronic tabulation equipment, raises many logistical as well as legal concerns,” he wrote.

But again in April, even as supervisors voted 2-1 to spend $308,000 on two new high-speed tabulation machines, they said they eventually want to get rid of them. At that meeting, Antenori repeated his desire to test the law on ballot tabulation, in civil court, before an election.

Gomez said at the time that she would like to get rid of machines to count votes, but she believes state law requires the county to use them. She said the same thing in a recent interview with Votebeat. Also, machine malfunctions during the 2024 elections, which didn’t affect the results but did slow down the counting process considerably, concerned her, she said, and she would have had trouble certifying that election.

At the April meeting, she asked the public to have patience while the supervisors figured it out. If they proceed now with the law as it is, she said, “they will come after us and they will put us in jail the minute we say we have no machines.”

It was one of many allusions supervisors made to the charges against Crosby, who has pleaded not guilty to interference with an election officer and conspiracy. As he awaits trial, Crosby has demanded the county cover about $300,000 in legal fees.

The supervisors had attempted to pass that claim on to the insurance pool that represents county governments in the state. But the pool denied that claim last month. A pool attorney said in an Aug. 11 letter that its agreement with the county excludes coverage of claims arising out of any “dishonest, fraudulent, criminal, malicious, deliberate or intended WRONGFUL ACT.”

The pool also reserves the right to deny a claim when “it does not involve accidental and fortuitous circumstances,” the lawyer wrote.

Last week, the supervisors met in private to discuss what to do now.

Jen Fifield is a reporter for Votebeat based in Arizona. Contact Jen at jfifield@votebeat.org.

What to know about the push for open primaries in Pennsylvania

2025-07-07T09:00:00+00:00

Votebeat is a nonprofit news organization reporting on voting access and election administration across the U.S. Sign up for Votebeat Pennsylvania’s free newsletter here.

More than 3 out of 4 voters in Pennsylvania support opening up the state’s primary elections to independent voters, according to an August 2024 Franklin & Marshall poll.

But despite that broad consensus, and the yearslong push from some state lawmakers and advocates to make it happen, Pennsylvania remains one of the most restrictive states in determining who can participate in primary elections.

Lawmakers have introduced bills to open primaries, but so far, they haven’t gained much traction. Here’s a look at the effort, and where it stands.

What is an open primary?

According to the National Conference of State Legislators, an “open primary” occurs in states that do not ask voters to select a party when they register to vote, and that allow voters to choose each time which party’s primary they wish to participate in. But the term is often used as a catchall to describe a range of processes, including fully closed or partially open primaries.

Pennsylvania has the most restrictive primary voting system possible, known as a fully closed primary. Under this system, only voters registered with a political party can vote in that party’s primary. According to the NCSL, Pennsylvania is one of just 10 states with such a strict boundary.

Nine other states have “partially closed” primaries. They allow political parties to choose whether they want to allow unaffiliated voters to participate in their primaries, but parties can exclude registered members of other parties.

Arizona, along with six other states, permits unaffiliated voters to participate in any party primary, but doesn’t allow registered party members to vote in another party’s primary.

Fully open-primary states such as Michigan allow voters to cross party lines and vote in whichever primary they choose, regardless of party registration. But voters must choose a single party’s primary, and cannot switch between the parties for different races.

What would a shift to open primaries mean?

Proponents of opening Pennsylvania’s primaries to independent and unaffiliated voters argue that the move would have several benefits.

First, they point out that independent, unaffiliated, and third-party voters are making up a larger portion of the electorate: The number of Democrats on Pennsylvania’s rolls has been shrinking, while Republican registrations have been growing, but the number of people registering as independent, unaffiliated, or members of a third party has grown more.

Currently, more than 1.4 million voters are in that category, compared with roughly half that number 25 years ago.

While Democrats and Republicans are fairly close in registration numbers statewide, in many local communities, one of the two parties has a clear majority. This means candidates who win the primary often coast to victory in the fall, with only nominal opposition.

A 2024 Spotlight PA analysis found that the vast majority of state legislative races on the ballot that year were decided in the primary.

Proponents of opening up Pennsylvania’s primaries argue that this pattern effectively creates a system where the 1.4 million voters who aren’t registered with a major party cannot meaningfully participate in local elections.

And “your tax dollars to pay for that primary election regardless,” said Lauren Cristella, president of the Philadelphia-based good government group Committee of Seventy, which favors opening the state’s primaries. “So it’s also an issue of taxation without representation.”

Another key argument is that it would increase voter turnout. The May 20 municipal primary saw about 20% of registered voters participate. A study from the Bipartisan Policy Center found that when states open their primaries to unaffiliated voters, turnout increases by 5 percentage points.

Research also suggests opening primaries can result in more ideologically moderate candidates.

Opponents have argued that primaries are intended for members of a given political party to select who best represents the ideals of that party, and that opening it up to outside participants could mean electing representatives who don’t embody that party’s values.

“Some of the argument is ‘Oh well these are our teams. You wouldn’t want the Steelers to pick the running back for the Eagles, or vice versa,’” state Sen. Camera Bartolotta (R., Washington) said at a recent Keep Our Republic event. “Right now I think because of social media, and the nastiness and the vitriol and the extremes (in) both parties, more and more and more people are abandoning that party affiliation.”

Election administrators have noted that there may be some logistical challenges as well. For instance, members of local political committees are also elected during primaries. If the legislature were to pass a bill that allowed unaffiliated voters to participate in some primaries, such as for county commissioner, but not for party committee members, that would require more ballot configurations and more training to ensure that poll workers don’t hand voters the wrong ballot.

What’s the status of the push for open primaries?

There are currently two bills in the state legislature aimed at opening up Pennsylvania’s primaries.

Rep. Jared Solomon (D., Philadelphia) has a bill currently making its way through the state House that would allow unaffiliated voters to participate in either the Democratic or Republican primary, but wouldn’t allow third-party voters.

State Sen. Lisa Boscola (D., Lehigh) has said she plans to reintroduce a bill from the last legislative session that Sen. Dan Laughlin (R., Erie) co-sponsored, which would similarly open the primary election to independent voters, but not third-party voters. Additionally, it would prohibit independent voters from voting for party officers or committee members, which Solomon’s bill would also do.

However, election legislation of all types has had trouble in recent years getting through both chambers and to the governor’s desk. Republican leadership in the state Senate has been clear that any election reform must include expanded voter ID requirements.

“Right now, there’s just gridlock in Harrisburg,” Cristella said. “There’s bipartisan support in the House, and we think we can get it passed in the House, but things aren’t moving in the Senate. There’s some negotiations, it seems like, around the voter ID bill, where if a voter ID bill passes, then other things might be on the table to get the governor’s signature.”

Carter Walker is a reporter for Votebeat in partnership with Spotlight PA. Contact Carter at cwalker@votebeat.org.

Correction, July 7, 12:10 p.m.: A previous version of this story misstated the differences between the House and Senate bills. Neither bill would allow independents to vote for party officers.

Votebeat 2025: Our reporters look ahead to the big election stories of an ‘off’ election year

2025-01-13T10:00:00+00:00

Votebeat is a nonprofit news organization reporting on voting access and election administration across the U.S.

There’s no federal election to look ahead to this year, but there’s a lot of important activity on voting and election policy that our Votebeat reporters will be following.

We’re expecting movement on several fronts in 2025, including legislation to fight the (nonexistent) scourge of noncitizens voting, national policy fights over voter access, budget brouhahas, and continued turnover of election officials and workers. Meanwhile, local elections still need to go off as planned.

Here’s what our reporters are looking out for this year in the states they cover:

Arizona: A push to speed up results

For the first time in four years, Arizona is starting the year without any open court challenges to election results. The recurring false claims about elections appear to be on hiatus as Republicans in the state celebrate Donald Trump’s victory and local wins. Still, many of the Republicans who won in November campaigned on the idea that our elections needed fixing. Now that they are in office, some voters may expect them to take action.

Five of Arizona’s 15 counties have new county recorders administering their elections, and many of them were elected on platforms of major change. They will soon make decisions such as how to clean county voter rolls, where people can vote early, and how many ballot drop boxes are available. We’ll keep an eye on their work.

Leading the charge statewide, surely, will be Gina Swoboda, chair of the Arizona Republican Party, who recently announced she will run to keep her position. Swoboda is still contracted, for the upcoming year, to serve as Arizona Senate Republicans’ elections policy adviser. Her knowledge of how elections work is reflected in one of the first bills of the new session, which begins Monday: a somewhat in-the-weeds proposal from Sen. President Warren Petersen that would very effectively speed up final election results.

Republican leaders’ main election-related mission of the session will be convincing Gov. Katie Hobbs — along with other Democrats and voting rights advocates — that we need to trade voting convenience for faster results. And now that Republicans have a larger majority, Democrats might have to negotiate if they want any of their proposals to survive.

With state Sen. Wendy Rogers leading the Judiciary and Elections Committee, prepare for election conspiracists to be given a solid platform and others to be silenced, as in years past. And expect to see discussion of some of the most extreme proposals to upend elections, such as eliminating early voting and countywide voting.

It’s not clear if any other Republicans will step up to block those proposals from getting to the governor’s desk, now that Sen. Ken Bennett has lost his seat to former state Rep. Mark Finchem. But as long as Hobbs is still in office, it’s clear those proposals stand virtually no chance of becoming law.

—Jen Fifield

Michigan: Preparing for 2026, and a political shift

In Michigan, 2025 will set the tone for next year’s statewide elections, when voters will choose a new governor, attorney general, and secretary of state. No one has officially announced plans to run for secretary of state yet to replace the term-limited Jocelyn Benson as the state’s top election official, but it sounds like some well-known legislators and county clerks are interested.

Benson herself is likely to announce a bid for governor in the next few months. Detroit’s three-term mayor, Mike Duggan, said he’s running for governor, too, leaving a wide open mayoral race this year in the state’s largest city. Several council members and former House Speaker Joe Tate are potentially considering running. The Detroit race will be a test once again of what the city’s changes to its ballot-counting setup, combined with expanded access to early and absentee voting, mean for the speed of results.

The Michigan Legislature is preparing to start its new session this week, with Republicans controlling the House. Bryan Posthumus, the new majority leader, has made clear that new safeguards to prevent noncitizen voting are a priority for him. The Republican from Rockford wants voters to show proof of citizenship when registering and wants to tighten the ID requirements for when voters actually cast their ballot, although it isn’t clear yet how exactly a proof of citizenship requirement would work in Michigan.

If lawmakers don’t take up the proposal — which is unlikely to gain traction in the Democrat-controlled Senate — a group called the Committee to Protect Voters’ Rights appears prepared to launch a signature-gathering effort, called Prove It, Michigan, to get the proposal on the ballot for voters to approve directly.

—Hayley Harding

Pennsylvania: Eyes on Supreme Court races, and decisions

The nation’s eyes may not be as focused on Pennsylvania’s election administration as they were in 2024 (phew!), but there’s still plenty going on, even in an “off” election year. Seats on the Pennsylvania Supreme Court and local municipal races, including a mayoral race in Pittsburgh, will be on the ballot.

Speaking of the state Supreme Court, several pending cases could see a decision this year. We are awaiting a final ruling in a Washington County case on whether counties are required to notify mail voters if they make errors on their ballots that could disqualify them. And the high court has yet to address whether rejecting a mail ballot for lacking a proper date violates the state constitution.

The state Legislature starts a new two-year session this month. The last two sessions, following the 2020 election, saw little movement on election law changes. Perhaps the reduced scrutiny will leave more room for action. We’ll be looking at the priorities of both parties and what bills are on the horizon.

—Carter Walker

Texas: Push for voting restrictions continues

After a contentious but otherwise smooth presidential election which provided victories for state Republicans, it’s not yet clear whether in 2025 Texas will expand or further restrict voting access as the legislature prepares to convene.

Democratic lawmakers are again proposing bills that would allow voters to register to vote online. Such a proposal would require bipartisan support to get to the governor’s desk. Across the aisle, Republicans have filed legislation that would require voters to show proof of citizenship in order to register to vote. But some election officials wonder how Texas can pull this off without first improving its current paper-based voter registration system, which has in some cases led to disenfranchisement of voters.

Republicans have also filed legislation to end the countywide polling place program, which allows voters in participating counties to cast their ballot at any voter center in their county on election day. Conservative activists have spread baseless claims of voter fraud in their campaign to get rid of countywide voting. The same activists also support legislation that would limit the use of electronic voting equipment and encourage counting ballots by hand, which takes longer and is less accurate.

—Natalia Contreras

Wisconsin: Activity in all three branches

This year could be transformative for election policy in Wisconsin. The Wisconsin Supreme Court’s ideological majority may flip, a new state budget will get passed, and the state legislature is all but certain to make at least small changes in how elections are conducted.

The April election to replace retiring liberal Justice Ann Walsh Bradley on the Wisconsin Supreme Court will have critical implications for election policy. In that election, liberal candidate Susan Crawford faces conservative Brad Schimel, a Republican former attorney general. The outcome will not only determine the ideological balance of the seven-member court, but could also shape the way key policy and political fights are resolved. With the Democratic governor and Republican Legislature often at odds, many of those fights end up in the state’s highest court.

The Wisconsin Elections Commission’s budget request seeks funding to subsidize local governments’ election offices, something the agency states is critical since federal COVID-19 relief funds used for that purpose are dwindling. The agency is also requesting $2 million to conduct audits, bolster voter accessibility programs, and cooperate with legislative requests. The Legislature rejected a similar request last budget cycle.

In the Legislature, election officials are likely to lobby for new processes to speed up ballot counting, while Republicans are likely to continue trying to enshrine election policy in the state constitution. The next two years could also see a boost in constitutional proposals — a politically powerful method for Republicans because the governor can’t veto those measures.

Some political observers expect Wisconsin’s state Senate to flip from the GOP to Democrats after the 2026 midterms, so Republicans may see this session and the constitutional amendment strategy as their last hope to enshrine their preferred policies in the state constitution, including photo ID and proof-of-citizenship requirements.

—Alexander Shur

Jessica Huseman is Votebeat’s editorial director and is based in Dallas. Contact Jessica at jhuseman@votebeat.org.

Nov. 5 was another reminder that successful elections are normal in America

2024-11-11T13:13:06+00:00

America’s thousands of election administrators have pulled off another successful one. Votebeat expected this outcome, and so did the election administrators. But so many other people didn’t go into the day with that confidence.

This is a perennial frustration of mine. I started covering elections in 2016, and have run massive collaborative journalism projects in every election year since. Every single time, I assure everyone that in most of the country at least, poll watchers aren’t going to cause chaos, massive technological meltdowns aren’t likely, and local and state election administrators generally do the best they can, which tends to be pretty good. For the vast, vast majority of Americans, voting will be a routine, benign experience. As it should be.

2020 showed us that some events outside of election administrators’ control can darken the experience, like then-President Donald Trump’s allies submitting fake slates of electors or storming the U.S. Capitol. But the job of conducting elections themselves tends to go very smoothly.

Still, every year, activists and even political journalists who do not follow the act of voting particularly closely say this will be the year everything changes. And so far — even with Trump insisting each of those years that he’s going to upend the entire voting system with observers and demands for recounts — it has not. Votes are cast, and voters go home. There are, of course, a small handful of disruptions: printing problems in Apache County, Arizona, say, or long lines in places like Pennsylvania and Utah. But considering that there are hundreds of thousands of polling places across the country, such occurrences are rare indeed.

Imagine if any other major process had to be arranged for everyone in the country over a three-week period: enrolling every child in a brand new school, for instance, or getting every American’s passport reissued. The system would break down. We’ve seen that happen with far less ambitious undertakings. Recall the disastrous 2013 launch of the HealthCare.gov website. Processing unemployment benefits was a nightmare during COVID. Applying for federal financial aid for college students goes awry every time officials change it.

This doesn’t happen with voting.

The United States is, in fact, very good at elections. Managing voting is one of the things this country does best, and that simple and obvious fact is routinely ignored by people across the political spectrum who spend the weeks before the election predicting or assuming that mass fraud will take over, or that troublemakers armed with bullhorns will terrorize voters at their polling places. Neither thing happens at scale.

There are a lot of reasons for this. The United States is, really, running 10,000 individual elections at the same time under different rules and in different places. Yes, that adds a lot of complexity, but it also makes it difficult to organize a nationwide or even statewide plan to upend it. The people who may seek to sow chaos are a lot braver behind a keyboard than they are standing in front of their fellow Americans.

Most crucial, I think, is that local election administrators are, on the whole, honest, hardworking people who are good at their jobs and who try as hard as they can to serve their neighbors.

In the eight years I have been covering this space, election administrators have faced down profound challenges: people in their own communities screaming at them; budget shortages; angry state legislatures demanding unreasonable and pointless changes; a pandemic that transformed how this country voted; a torrent of misinformation; and a swelling crowd of people who — led by a presidential candidate and his allies — have come to distrust them and the system itself, for no provable reason. Still, these administrators have pulled off elections without major issues every single one of those years.

It is my firm hope that, at some point, this country will start to see that success for what it is: the product of a system that is well managed by competent people.

Jessica Huseman is Votebeat’s editorial director and is based in Dallas. Contact Jessica at jhuseman@votebeat.org.

Little-noticed statehouse races could reshape election policies next year

2024-09-25T16:22:16+00:00

Votebeat is a nonprofit news organization reporting on voting access and election administration across the U.S. Sign up for our free newsletters here.

Americans agree the fate of democracy rests on the outcome of the 2024 presidential election, even if they don’t agree on what that outcome should be. But they may be too focused on the top of the ticket.

A small number of lower-profile state legislative races in districts around the country could shift partisan control of legislative chambers in several key swing states next year, potentially allowing state lawmakers to reshape how elections are run.

“What’s really going to impact most voters when it comes to how they experience their elections — the timing of their elections, when ballots are counted, how things are processed, security and infrastructure changes — that’s all happening at the state level,” said Megan Boler Bellamy, vice president of law and policy at Voting Rights Lab, a nonprofit group that monitors state legislation on voting and elections.

“The makeup of the state legislature is really, really critical to the voting experience of most of the citizens in these states,” Bellamy said. I think it’s something that’s not getting the attention it should.”

In states including Georgia, Arizona, Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin, she said, the Voting Rights Lab is watching how lawmakers handle several key issues: rulemaking around certification and other election administration issues, funding for elections, a push to require voters to provide documentary proof of citizenship, and threats to election officials, among other things.

A shift in the balance of power in legislatures could send long-stalled bills on election policy shooting towards approval. It could also mean more abrupt changes in election laws and regulations for long-suffering election officials.

In Pennsylvania, for example, changes in the makeup of the closely divided Legislature could jumpstart efforts to give local election officials time to pre-process mail ballots, a Democratic priority, or a Republican push for new voter identification requirements. In Michigan, voters amended the state Constitution in 2022 to pass several voting and election changes, including allowing early voting and dropboxes, but lawmakers control funding and important choices about how the changes work in practice.

Republicans have long dominated state legislatures, but that means they’re playing defense in more states, a nonpartisan analysis by the University of Virginia’s Center for Politics found, and Democrats made more gains in 2022 than expected.

Republican and Democratic operatives alike are keenly aware that power and control in some states could shift hands, and both parties are focusing on a small number of seats they say could be decisive.

The prospect of Democrats regaining control of a majority of state legislative chambers for the first time since 2010 is “the greatest long-term threat to our party,” wrote the Republican State Leadership Committee, the party arm that takes the lead on legislative races, in a memo describing spending plans and highlighting battleground races in Arizona, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, Michigan, and other states.

The RSLC will spend $50 million in state legislative races this cycle, a new record, the group said.

Will Rusche, a spokesman for the Democratic Legislative Campaign Committee, the Democrats’ state legislative campaign arm, said that in both the 2022 and 2023 elections, state legislative majorities were decided by extremely close margins. For example, he pointed out, Democrats secured a single-seat majority in the Pennsylvania House in part because one Democrat eked out a victory by just 63 votes. That means either party could gain ground with less investment than might be required to move the needle on a competitive statewide U.S. Senate race, for example, and volunteering on behalf of a candidate could potentially have a big effect.

Rusche said the DLCC is focused on states at a tipping point, where investing resources could change the power balance. For example, he said, Republicans control both houses of the North Carolina Legislature, but flipping a single seat in the state House would take away the party’s supermajority and allow Democrats to sustain a governor’s veto.

“State legislatures are kind of the building blocks of democracy,” he said. “It’s where a lot of our election processes and voting laws right now are being passed.”

Here’s a look at the some of the states where shifts in the statehouse could determine the course of election policy:

Arizona: Democrats hope to chip away at voting restrictions

In Arizona, the Republican-controlled Legislature has been determined to overhaul the state’s election system, but has failed to get any substantive proposals past Democratic Gov. Katie Hobbs in the last two years. That’s unlikely to change next year, no matter what happens with legislative races in November.

But Democrats may have their best chance in recent history to gain some legislative seats this election, according to some political observers, which would put Republicans’ narrow control at risk.

Wonder Woman herself, actress Lynda Carter, has even weighed in on one closely watched House race, declining to endorse her sister, who is running as a Republican.

A loss of control for Republicans would give Democrats a chance to chip away at Republican-led election policies that restricted voting access in recent years. And, considering that Republicans spent the last two years inviting election conspiracy theorists to speak at legislative hearings and entertaining extreme measures in committee, it would also mean a major change in the way lawmakers do business.

Both parties are keenly aware that every vote could matter in the down-ballot races.

When election officials recently discovered a glitch in state systems that threw into question whether nearly 100,000 voters could vote in state and local races in addition to federal ones, the state GOP pushed for them to have a full ballot. In this case, the largest group of affected voters were Republicans. An analysis showed many lived in key legislative districts, which could be decided by slim margins. The Arizona Supreme Court ruled Friday that those voters will remain full ballot voters.

In order to win control of the Legislature, Democrats would need to both pick up seats and defend some vulnerable ones, said Republican political consultant Barrett Marson. Marson expects high voter turnout from young Democrats excited about a ballot proposition that would solidify abortion rights in the state, but he doesn’t know if those voters will take the time to fully fill out their ballot and vote Democratic on down-ballot races, especially given how long the ballot is this year.

If Democrats gain control, or if there’s a 50-50 split, Democrats may try to reverse some of the laws Republicans have passed in the name of election security. They might attempt to repeal a law requiring documented proof of citizenship for voters and bring back the permanent early voting list, which allows voters to receive a ballot in the mail every election even if they don’t ever vote by mail, for example.

A Democratic-led Legislature might also try to create automatic voter registration in the state, which automatically registers residents to vote when they interact with a state agency such as when they get a driver’s license, something that many Democratic lawmakers have said they support.

If Republicans maintain control, expect more proposals to restrict early and mail voting and to eliminate vote centers. Even though Republicans had a one-seat majority in both chambers the last two years, those proposals didn’t make it through the Legislature, in large part because state Sen. Ken Bennett, a Republican and former secretary of state, voted against them.

But Bennett lost his primary race this year to Mark Finchem, a former state lawmaker who has been a leader in the movement to spread election fraud conspiracy theories. A Republican-controlled Legislature next year could also continue to give generous speaking opportunities to those making election fraud claims, while limiting time for others.

Ben Scheel, executive director of the left-leaning group Opportunity Arizona, said that this would continue to erode voter confidence.

“It’s completely damaging to voter confidence when you have entirely unfounded claims going on in the government-sanctioned, institutionally sanctioned committee hearings,” Scheel said. “It makes it look like it’s true, and it’s just not true.”

— Jen Fifield

Michigan: Laws related to Proposition 2 are at stake

In 2022, for the first time in decades, Democrats won control of both chambers of the Legislature, while holding on to the three statewide offices: governor, attorney general, and secretary of state. But they don’t hold the legislative majority by much: Control hinges on two-seat margins in the House and Senate.

Polling shows several statehouse races are nearly tied. If Republicans were to reclaim either chamber, the divided control would likely slow the passage of election legislation that Democrats have pushed for. If Republicans win back the House and Senate, first on the chopping block could be election laws that the party has opposed over the past two years.

That’s likely to include laws such as Public Act 74, which changes the requirements for recounts and includes felony charges for those who “willfully interfere” with recounts. The law wouldn’t go into effect until three months after the 2024 session fully adjourns, which hasn’t happened yet.

Republicans could also seek to weaken the laws prompted by 2022′s Proposal 2, which amended the state constitution to expand voting access, including early in-person voting. That could take a variety of forms, including limiting how jurisdictions conduct early-voting days.

A Republican majority would also imperil any bills that don’t make it through the legislature this year, such as the proposed Michigan Voting Rights Act. The package of bills, which aims to reinstate some of the protections of the 1965 federal Voting Rights Act that were weakened by the courts in recent years, passed the Michigan Senate just last week, moving on to the House committee on elections.

The legislation has been criticized by Republicans for going beyond federal standards.

“These bills would cost taxpayers millions of dollars and create new obstacles for our clerks and local units of government that are simply unnecessary,” Sen. Ruth Johnson, a Republican from Holly and a former secretary of state, said in a news release after the Senate passed the bills. “These bills go far beyond the voting rights protections already afforded to all of our citizens under both the U.S. and Michigan constitutions, and they would create a huge new bureaucracy under the secretary of state that would help interest groups sue our local units of government and our hardworking clerks.”

— Hayley Harding

Pennsylvania: Partisan shift could ease gridlock on election bills

All of the state House’s 203 seats and half of the state Senate are up for grabs this year. Pennsylvania currently has the nation’s only split Legislature, with Democrats in control of the House and Republicans holding the upper chamber.

Democrats hold the House by the thinnest of margins: A single seat. Any losses there could put both chambers squarely in the hands of Republicans, since the Senate is unlikely to see a shift.

The closely divided Legislature has essentially meant gridlock on election legislation. Early hopes for a grand bargain packaging both parties’ priorities came to naught. But shifts in control could shake legislation loose.

If Republicans win, they could return to a tactic they deployed in previous sessions: going straight to the voters with proposed constitutional amendments that get around the threat of a veto by the Democratic governor. Republicans could use this tactic to revive stalled voter ID legislation, though they would have to maintain their control during the 2026 midterm elections, since constitutional amendments have to pass in two consecutive legislative sessions before going on the ballot.

Democrats are unlikely to win control of the state Senate, but if they do and also manage to maintain or expand their House majority, they could have an easier time passing their voting priorities, such as allowing pre-canvassing of mail ballots, which speeds the tabulation and reporting of results, and same-day voter registration.

“The very slim majority for Democrats in the House has made it difficult for them to get anything done,” said Kyle Miller, a policy advocate with the nonpartisan group Protect Democracy. And unless the Senate flips or becomes evenly split, giving the Democratic lieutenant governor a tie-breaking vote, Miller said, “we’re going to see more of the same” next year.

— Carter Walker

Texas: Race for state House speaker looms large

The fate of new election legislation in Texas could depend less on the outcome of the November elections, and more on who wins the race for House speaker in the next session.

Republicans easily control both chambers of the legislature, but some GOP-backed election administration and voting legislation stalled in the state House last year, including a proposal to eliminate the widely used countywide polling place program and a bill that would require proof of citizenship to register to vote.

Some Senate Republicans and Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick have blamed House Speaker Dade Phelan.

Most proposals approved by the Senate last year “never even received a hearing in committee,” Patrick said in a statement in August. “The Texas Senate passed 23 election-related bills that did not pass the House. These bills would have been a step toward restoring the public’s confidence in fair and honest elections in the State of Texas. It’s an absolute disgrace that Speaker Phelan killed these critical bills.”

Phelan, a Republican from East Texas, is likely to win reelection in November, but whether he’ll be selected again as speaker is up in the air: At least five House Republicans and one House Democrat are challenging him for the gavel.

Phelan narrowly survived a primary challenge this year after he supported the 2023 impeachment of Attorney General Ken Paxton, a fellow Republican, on corruption and bribery charges. Paxton was acquitted.

A change in speaker could lead to other changes affecting the Legislature’s handling of election bills. Phelan has been criticized within his party for sometimes appointing Democrats as committee chairs, though the House committee on elections has been led by Republicans. Experts say the choice of chairman next year will dictate how quickly legislation advances between the two chambers, and whether election and voting legislation championed by the most conservative Republicans will stall again.

Something else to watch: Republicans are widely seen as attempting to establish a supermajority that would make it easier to pass such bills, as well as other conservative priorities such as school voucher legislation.

“People think that Democrats don’t have a say in governing because they’re in the minority of the legislature, but that’s not true. They do have a significant say,” said Brandon Rottinghaus, a political science professor at the University of Houston. “They can really gum things up if they wanted to, and they will if they don’t get a speaker who they think is right or that will work with them. The House Speaker is a traffic cop for the house’s agenda, and so how much trust they have among the members and their skills at navigating a tense session is critical.”

— Natalia Contreras

Wisconsin: Impact of a potentially split Legislature isn’t clear

The composition of the Wisconsin Legislature is all but certain to change significantly under new legislative maps that undid what experts deemed some of the most gerrymandered political boundaries in the nation. Under the previous GOP-drawn maps, Wisconsin Republicans were just a couple of seats short of a supermajority in both chambers, which would have allowed them to override a veto by Gov. Tony Evers, a Democrat, on election legislation.

The new maps make Democrats more competitive, but they still aren’t likely to gain a legislative majority in both chambers this cycle. Senate elections are staggered, so Democrats’ hopes of a majority will almost certainly have to wait until 2026. But they do have a chance of flipping the Assembly.

If they do, it would be the first legislative session in more than a decade with split control. It’s unclear whether that would affect which election legislation reaches the governor’s desk, because many of the bills that clerks and liberals have prioritized — for example, a bill that would have allowed clerks to process absentee ballots the day before the election — passed through the Assembly but didn’t receive a Senate vote.

Other bills, such as a proposal to bring Wisconsin in line with the federal Electoral Count Reform Act, passed the Senate but not the Assembly. A Democratic Assembly majority, or even a slimmer Republican majority, could lead to that bill passing in next year’s session.

One area where a Democratic Assembly majority could matter is the budget. Every two years, the Legislature processes different agencies’ budget requests. Last time around, legislative Republicans rejected a Wisconsin Elections Commission request to fund an office focused on building transparency and focusing on election compliance.

The commission has a similar request in the upcoming budget, and it could get through if Democrats land an Assembly majority, giving them more seats on the budget-writing legislative committee.

But beyond narrow requests and compromises, other Democratic priorities — like reducing the residency requirement, letting 16- and 17-year-olds preregister to vote, and expanding early in-person voting — are unlikely to pass through the Legislature in the upcoming session. They stand a chance if Democrats secure a Senate majority in 2026.

— Alexander Shur

Correction: Democratic Legislative Campaign Committee spokesman Will Rusche’s name was initially misspelled.

Carrie Levine is Votebeat’s managing editor and is based in Washington, D.C. She edits and frequently writes Votebeat’s national newsletter. Contact Carrie at clevine@votebeat.org.