Votebeat

What are Democrats’ and Republicans’ election priorities if they win control of Michigan state government?

2026-05-27T09:00:00+00:00

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

It hasn’t been the most productive couple of years for election legislation in Michigan.

Democrats in control of the state Senate have introduced bills that would amend rules for signature gathering and move up the state’s primary election from August to May. Over in the House, the Republican majority has proposed requiring people registering to vote to prove their citizenship, banning ranked choice voting, and preventing foreign nationals from spending money on ballot measure campaigns.

Bills have occasionally been sent from one chamber to the other, but time and time again, they never again see the light of day. Only two election bills, both bipartisan efforts, have made it out of committee in a second chamber. None have been signed into law.

That’s not a huge surprise given that different parties run the two chambers, particularly given how contentious election policy has become. But it does make the November election — in which Michigan voters will select a new governor as well as an entirely new legislature — that much more important. State House seats in Michigan are up every two years, while state Senate seats, like the governorship, are up every four.

The potential that one party could win a trifecta — i.e., control of the Senate, House, and governorship — is enticing to legislators who want to see Michigan as the home base for their party’s election goals. Michigan Democrats last held a trifecta in 2024, while Republicans last had one in 2018.

Unsurprisingly, though, the two parties have very different visions for the state’s elections if they take it all this fall. Democrats want to bolster voting rights, while Republicans want to improve security in the state’s elections.

Here are some specific proposals that each party is focusing on.

Democrats want to expand voting rights in Michigan

Sen. Jeremy Moss, the Senate president pro tempore and a Democrat from Southfield, noted that Democrats in the state have already passed much of their elections agenda. Moss has been chair of the Senate Elections Committee since 2023, and in that time, he said Democrats have “achieved a lot.”

“One of the biggest stories” out of the 2023-24 session, when Democrats held their first trifecta in nearly 40 years, “was how much we improved elections here in the state of Michigan,” said Moss, who is retiring from the legislature this year to seek a U.S. House seat.

But there’s more work to be done, he said. If Democrats win the trifecta back, he expects to see the Michigan Voting Rights Act finally become law. The MVRA, which is made up of four bills, aims to fill in the gaps of the federal Voting Rights Act, which has been weakened by a series of U.S. Supreme Court decisions in recent years. It was introduced last session but ultimately failed to make it through the chaotic final month of the session. Senators introduced it again earlier this month.

Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson, the frontrunner for the Democratic nomination for governor, has supported the MVRA and called for its passage late last month after the Supreme Court’s decision in Louisiana v. Callais further eroded the federal version. That has left Democrats with what Sen. Darrin Camilleri, a Democrat from Trenton, called “an obligation to take action” during a hearing on the bills last week.

“Whether you’re an independent or Republican or Democrat, these bills are good for you,” Camilleri said. “They protect your vote and your voice no matter who you support.”

The bills, reintroduced this session as Senate Bills 961-964, passed out of committee last week in a 4-1 party-line vote, clearing the way for a vote by the full Senate. However, they are expected to languish in the Republican-controlled House.

Michigan Republicans are focused on preventing noncitizen voting

On the other hand, if Republicans win a trifecta, party leaders promise to focus on election security measures, especially a proof-of-citizenship requirement.

Rep. Rachelle Smit, speaker pro tempore of the Michigan House and a Republican from Martin, held a press conference last week slamming Senate Democrats for failing to take up Republicans’ election bills, including her own proposal to ban foreign nationals from spending money on ballot measure campaigns in the state.

She also criticized the MVRA, calling it “fear-mongering.”

“The most important thing that we could be doing to preserve and protect our voting rights is pass Representative [Jason] Woolford’s bill, which would be requiring proof of citizenship to register to vote,” Smit said.

Proof of citizenship has been a major priority for Republicans this session, beyond just Woolford’s bill. Rep. Bryan Posthumus, a Republican from Rockford, introduced a state constitutional amendment to require proof of citizenship when someone registers to vote, although that ultimately did not pass the House. It’s possible a proof-of-citizenship amendment will be directly on the ballot this fall, though, after a similar effort from Americans for Citizens Voting submitted more than 750,000 signatures to the Bureau of Elections earlier this year.

“Proof of citizenship is a critical one,” Anthony Forlini, the Macomb County clerk and GOP candidate for secretary of state, told Votebeat when sharing his own list of what he would like to see happen if Republicans win big this fall.

Secretary of state is not considered part of the trifecta, but if Forlini wins, he’ll be expected to work with the legislature to enact voting legislation. His wish list right now includes “accountability” in how absentee ballots are handled and improvements to the state’s campaign finance laws.

“I’d like to see more transparency across the board as it revolves around election integrity,” he said, pointing to some of his own efforts in Macomb County to improve transparency.

He suggested a stronger monitoring system for ballot drop boxes to verify who drops off ballots at them. State law already requires video monitoring, but Forlini said some videos have captured people dropping off a significant number of ballots, possibly in violation of the law (in Michigan, people can only return ballots on behalf of family or members of their household). Such a video came out in Hamtramck last summer, but Forlini said he was aware of videos in other communities as well, although he didn’t name them.

“These are things that need to be looked at,” he said. “It’s not voter suppression. You’re suppressing votes by allowing these things to happen.”

Hayley Harding is a reporter for Votebeat based in Michigan. Contact Hayley at hharding@votebeat.org.

New voting requirements? Troops at the polls? We asked 37 election experts what could disrupt the 2026 elections.

2026-04-17T09:00:00+00:00

Votebeat is a nonprofit news organization reporting on voting access and election administration across the U.S. Sign up for our free weekly newsletter to get the latest.

There are always unanswered questions heading into any election. But usually those questions are more along the lines of “who’s going to win?” and less “will the federal government interfere with the election?”

But here in 2026, President Donald Trump’s broadsides against the legitimacy of U.S. elections and efforts to overhaul election laws have generated lots of uncertainty — and anxiety — about whether this will be a normal election year. Election officials and voters alike are left to wonder whether there will be new requirements for voters, physical interventions at the polls, or attempts to overturn results after the fact.

Despite seemingly endless speculation, no one knows for sure how likely any of these things is. But to get the most well-informed assessments, we turned to the people who spend the most time thinking about elections.

We asked 37 experts in the field of election administration — academics, lawyers, former election officials, etc. — to answer 26 questions about the likelihood of various scenarios coming to pass in the 2026 midterms.

Their answers reflect a general sense of cautious optimism about the most dire scenarios — such as an election getting overturned — and skepticism that the federal government will successfully change voting rules. But they also still believe the election will face serious challenges, including federal agents potentially showing up at polling places.

Election experts say new federal laws are unlikely, but split on state laws and court intervention

Since retaking office in 2025, Trump has pushed aggressively for the federal government to set more rules around how elections are run, promoting legislation that would require registering voters to prove their citizenship with documentation and issuing two election-related executive orders. (The first executive order has largely been blocked in court, though the administration has appealed. The second is currently under litigation, and the conventional wisdom is that it will be halted as well.)

However, experts were skeptical that these measures would ever take effect. Thirty-four of our 37 respondents said it was unlikely that the federal government would successfully require new registrants to prove their citizenship for the midterms, and 32 said it was unlikely that the federal government would successfully require all voters to show an ID or restrict the use of no-excuse absentee or mail ballots. (They provided their answers before Trump issued his second executive order, which sought to regulate mail voting through the U.S. Postal Service.)

Likewise, virtually all respondents thought it was unlikely that the federal government would restrict the hours or locations of in-person voting or limit or eliminate the use of voting machines to tally ballots in the midterms.

However, experts were more open to the possibility that some of these policies could take effect in individual states. Although none thought it was likely that a significant number of states would limit or eliminate the use of voting machines, about a quarter of respondents thought it was at least somewhat likely that a significant number of states would restrict the use of no-excuse absentee or mail ballots in the midterms. About one-third thought it was at least somewhat likely that a significant number of states would strengthen their voter ID requirements or restrict the hours or locations of in-person voting.

Even more respondents, 15 of the 37, thought it was at least somewhat likely that a significant number of states would pass proof-of-citizenship requirements before the election — perhaps unsurprisingly, given that such laws were working their way through several state legislatures at the time. Those laws have since passed in Florida, Mississippi, South Dakota, and Utah, although Florida’s does not take effect until 2027 and Mississippi’s is limited in scope.

Overall, though, most experts didn’t expect states to significantly change their election laws this year. Derek Muller, an election law professor at the University of Notre Dame, pointed out that many states have part-time legislatures that won’t be in session between now and the election. “I expect new legislation in the months ahead that might affect the 2026 election to be negligible,” Muller said.

If there are going to be major election-law changes before the midterms, experts expect them to come from the third branch of government: the judiciary. Seventeen experts said it was at least somewhat likely that pre-election court rulings would significantly alter election rules shortly before the midterms, although 19 still said that was unlikely.

In follow-up interviews, those who thought this was likely said that they were keeping an eye both on currently pending cases — such as a U.S. Supreme Court case that could require all mail ballots to arrive by Election Day — and those that have not yet been filed. That said, a Supreme Court ruling earlier this year will probably encourage litigants to bring any cases challenging election rules well before the election, making last-minute rule changes less likely.

Experts expect federal agents to disrupt the 2026 election

For many election officials and voting advocates, the nightmare scenario for the 2026 midterms is if federal agents, such as U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, attempt to disrupt voting or the counting of ballots. It’s already illegal for armed troops to visit voting locations, and the Trump administration has repeatedly said that it will not send ICE agents to polling places this year. However, new Secretary of Homeland Security Markwayne Mullin has declined to absolutely rule it out, and a majority of the experts we surveyed expected something like this to happen.

Twenty-seven of the 37 respondents said it was at least somewhat likely that the federal government would deploy some form of military or law enforcement at or near polling places in the midterms. A slight majority said it was likely that Trump would ask the National Guard or federal agents to seize voting equipment during the election, and over three-quarters said it was likely that Trump would ask them to seize voting equipment after the election. (It’s worth noting that respondents gave these answers just a few weeks after the FBI raided an election office in Fulton County, Georgia, and Trump said that he regretted not asking the National Guard to seize voting machines after the 2020 election.)

Multiple respondents told Votebeat that the seizure of voting equipment was more likely after the election because the election results will be known at that time. “Before the election, no one will know where seizing equipment or ballots could shift pivotal races,” said Christopher Mann, the research director at the Center for Election Innovation and Research. “After the election, a bad actor will have a better picture of where seizing voting equipment or ballots can shift the overall outcome.”

Twenty-eight experts said it was at least somewhat likely that there would be physical threats to voters or polling places in the midterms, including 11 who said it was very likely. (They were perhaps recalling 2024, when a string of bomb threats forced some polling places to close temporarily, though election officials were able to minimize disruptions to voting.) However, experts were divided on whether these threats would deter people from voting. Twenty-one experts said it was unlikely that a significant number of voters would decide not to vote because of threats or physical intimidation, while 16 said that was likely.

Notably, experts were not very confident about their predictions about armed intervention in the midterms. Some also pointed out that, even if it’s likely that Trump might order federal agents to interfere in the election, that doesn’t mean they will succeed. “Election officials, courts, and other state and local officials are going to stop any attempt to seize voting equipment or ballots,” Mann predicted.

And some experts emphasized that even if there are incidents at specific polling places, they expect the election overall to run smoothly. “I’m an optimist, which probably led to many of my answers,” admitted Jeff Greenburg, a retired election official in Pennsylvania and a senior adviser at the Committee of Seventy, a Philadelphia-based government watchdog group. But Greenburg said he doesn’t expect that physical threats to voting “will significantly impact elections nationwide. I have faith and trust in our election officials, as well as the rule of law, and believe in the end every vote cast will be counted.”

Losers may claim fraud, but it’s unlikely an election gets overturned

Election experts of all stripes are confident that U.S. elections are secure. All 37 respondents said it was unlikely that a significant number of ineligible voters would cast ballots in the midterms, including 35 who said it was not at all likely. Experts also unanimously said that it was unlikely that voter fraud would influence the outcome of a 2026 congressional race.

However, that isn’t expected to stop candidates from questioning the election results. Almost three-quarters of experts thought it was at least somewhat likely that a significant number of losing candidates would claim fraud influenced the outcome of the election. All 37 thought it was likely that at least one congressional or statewide election would be legally challenged, with 30 calling it very likely.

At the same time, though, most experts don’t expect those challenges to succeed. Thirty-one of the 37 respondents thought it was unlikely that any congressional or statewide elections would be successfully overturned.

Nathaniel Rakich is Votebeat’s managing editor and is based in Washington, D.C. Contact Nathaniel at nrakich@votebeat.org.

New Wisconsin law seeks to prevent another election certification mess

2026-04-09T19:50:18+00:00

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

Wisconsin Gov. Tony Evers on Wednesday signed a bill bringing Wisconsin in line with a federal law seeking to prevent the kind of post-election chaos that President Donald Trump and his allies sowed after the 2020 election.

The Democrat also vetoed a Republican-authored bill that would have required the state election commission to hear administrative complaints against itself alleging violations of the federal Help America Vote Act, in line with a U.S. Justice Department demand for the state. That vetoed bill also would have required the state’s Legislative Audit Bureau to conduct audits for potential noncitizen voters.

The bill Evers signed updates Wisconsin’s deadlines for certifying presidential election results and casting electoral votes to match federal timelines set by Congress in 2022, after President Donald Trump claimed to have won the 2020 election and hundreds of individuals stormed the U.S. Capitol to prevent certification of President Joe Biden’s victory.

The mismatch led to a lawsuit in the 2024 presidential election, when the state’s Republican electors were uncertain which day to cast their Electoral College votes because state and federal law set the dates one day apart. The new law resolves that discrepancy.

The measure passed the Senate last session but stalled in the Assembly. With its passage, Wisconsin is among more than 20 states to update their laws to align with the Electoral Count Reform Act.

Vetoed bill would have imposed U.S. DOJ demand

The HAVA bill that Evers vetoed followed a U.S. Justice Department letter sent to the Wisconsin Elections Commission last year. It claimed the WEC was violating the law by declining to hear complaints filed against it.

Under HAVA, a 2002 law that overhauled voter registration and election administration, any state receiving federal election funding must also establish an administrative process for complaints about alleged violations of the law. If a violation is found, the state must provide a remedy; if not, it can dismiss the complaint.

In recent years, however, the WEC has dismissed HAVA complaints related to its own actions, citing a Wisconsin Supreme Court opinion saying it would be “nonsensical” for the agency to adjudicate a complaint against itself.

For example, the commission dismissed a complaint against the agency filed by a Democratic voter seeking to bar Trump from the ballot, and has repeatedly dismissed complaints filed by election conspiracy theorist Peter Bernegger that allege various kinds of election mismanagement.

“If a person has a complaint about the legality of the conduct of the commission, that person should file suit in court,” Evers said in his veto message Wednesday.

The vetoed bill also would have required the state to undertake audits of its voter registration list to identify potential noncitizen voters.

Evers said he objected to the “additional burden that could be placed on citizens to provide documentary proof of citizenship after they have already been lawfully registered to vote.”

Alexander Shur is a reporter for Votebeat based in Wisconsin. Contact Alexander at ashur@votebeat.org.

As the SAVE America Act stalls in the Senate, Florida passes its own version

2026-03-23T09:00:00+00:00

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

This news analysis was originally distributed in Votebeat’s free weekly newsletter. Sign up to get future editions, including the latest reporting from Votebeat bureaus and curated news from other publications, delivered to your inbox every Saturday.

A signature piece of voting legislation championed by President Donald Trump may not have much of a future in the U.S. Senate, but in Florida, the future is here.

Earlier this month, Republican lawmakers in Trump’s home state approved a sweeping overhaul of the state’s voter registration system, one that mirrors the core idea behind the federal SAVE America Act: requiring proof of citizenship to get on the rolls. The details differ — the Florida bill, for instance, would not take effect until after the midterms — but the architecture is the same. Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis is expected to sign the bill into law any day now.

In states like Florida, policies like this one that are on the GOP’s wish list can move quickly. Republicans face little meaningful Democratic opposition, and the bill advanced with relatively little resistance — a stark contrast to Washington, where things are far messier.

The U.S. Senate began debate March 17 on the SAVE America Act, the next step in a high-profile fight not just between Republicans and Democrats, but within the GOP itself. Some Republicans want to change Senate filibuster rules to force the bill through. Others, including party leaders, are loath to blow up the way the Senate does business — and say the votes simply aren’t there to do so anyway.

That divide is showing up in quieter ways, too. Some Republican lawmakers have raised concerns about how the proposal could affect absentee and mail voting — exposing a disconnect between the party’s national push and how voting actually works in many GOP-led states.

As of yet, the debate hasn’t gotten very far — it took until Saturday, the fifth day of debate, for the first vote to be held on any motions or amendments to the bill. That amendment, to bar transgender athletes from playing women’s sports, failed to receive the necessary 60 votes. The bill itself remains under consideration, but its ultimate fate appears sealed.

Meanwhile, in Florida, lawmakers aren’t waiting on Washington. They’re largely in lockstep, drawing on lessons from other states’ past attempts to require proof of citizenship and focusing on how to build a version of the policy that can withstand legal challenges.

Arizona didn’t have that roadmap. When voters there approved a ballot measure in 2004 that required registering voters to prove their citizenship, the state moved to reject people who used the federal voter registration form without providing their documents, triggering a legal challenge. In 2013, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled Arizona had to accept the federal form, which requires only an oath of citizenship — at least for federal elections.

But Arizona kept its proof-of-citizenship requirement for state elections, resulting in a split system. Voters who have provided citizenship documentation can cast ballots in all races; others can vote only in federal contests, a system that has proven messy for both administrators and voters.

Florida is trying to avoid that outcome. Instead of rejecting applicants outright, Florida’s proposal would build a verification layer behind the scenes, cross-checking new registrants against driver’s license records and other databases to confirm citizenship.

Voters who can’t be verified aren’t necessarily denied registration, but they can be flagged and required to take extra steps — casting a provisional ballot or providing documents later. On paper, the state is still accepting the federal form. In practice, eligibility may hinge on whether the state can independently confirm your citizenship. If the law is challenged — and it likely will be — courts will have to decide whether that distinction holds.

A ruling against Florida could push the state toward the same outcome as Arizona, where some voters are effectively eligible only for federal races. But if the approach is upheld, it could offer a blueprint for other states to require proof of citizenship without directly violating federal law.

Lawmakers in several other Republican-led states are moving quickly on similar proposals. South Dakota and Utah have advanced their own proof-of-citizenship policies, while similar measures are moving through the legislative process in Mississippi and Iowa.

As the federal SAVE America Act would, these state-level proof-of-citizenship requirements would create significant hurdles for people looking to register to vote; millions of American citizens lack ready access to proof of citizenship. But it’s not at all clear Republicans would benefit from this policy push. Some categories of voters who might have the hardest time producing documentation that proves their citizenship overlap heavily with the GOP base.

Even conservative analysts and Republican officials have acknowledged the risk: stricter documentation rules could hit rural and older voters especially hard, forcing them to navigate new bureaucratic hurdles or risk having their ballots rejected.

But Trump, for his part, has shown little interest in the specifics.

He has said he won’t sign any more major legislation unless it includes the SAVE America Act — a position that doesn’t reflect the basic math of the Senate, where the votes to pass it simply are not there. He also said he won’t endorse lawmakers who vote against the bill.

Whether that’s a negotiating tactic or a genuine red line is still unclear, but it’s already threatening to snarl legislation far beyond election policy. A bipartisan housing bill aimed at addressing affordability is now at risk, despite drawing broad support, as lawmakers weigh whether anything can move without triggering a veto threat.

And on social media, Trump has continued to frame the issue in stark — and often misleading — terms, insisting that widespread noncitizen voting is a major threat to U.S. elections.

“America’s Elections are Rigged, Stolen, and a Laughingstock all over the World,” he wrote on Truth Social in early March, encouraging Republicans to “fight” for the SAVE America Act. “We are either going to fix them, or we won’t have a Country any longer.”

It’s a narrative lawmakers in states like Florida are already writing into law — whether Congress ever acts on it or not.

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

The SAVE America Act is unlikely to pass in the Senate. Executive action could be next.

2026-03-16T09:00:00+00:00

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

After months of yammering — during which it appeared everyone on the internet was a newly-minted expert in Senate procedure — the long-running drama over the SAVE America Act may finally hit the chamber’s floor this week. It will likely run headlong into a wall. But that won’t end Republicans’ push to tighten voter eligibility requirements before this year’s midterm elections.

President Donald Trump has said the bill — which would create new requirements for voter ID and proof of citizenship, among other things — is his top legislative priority. He’s been running a steady pressure campaign on his own party, vowing not to sign other legislation until the SAVE America Act passes.

“The Republicans MUST DO, with PASSION, and at the expense of everything else, THE SAVE AMERICA ACT,” Trump posted on social media earlier this month, calling it “a Country Defining fight for the Soul of our Nation!”

Passion is all very well and good, of course, but in the Senate, arithmetic matters. Senate Majority Leader John Thune is signaling the numbers simply aren’t there, and he can’t be a romantic about it.

“For better or worse, I’m the one who has to be the cleareyed realist about what we can achieve here,” he told reporters.

Thune needs one of two things: 60 votes to advance the bill — which he lacks because Democrats are uniformly opposed — or 50 Republicans willing to blow up the filibuster, which he also has repeatedly said he doesn’t have. Proponents have also pushed for leadership to force Democrats into a so-called “talking filibuster,” meaning they’d have to actually talk continuously in order to hold the floor and stall the bill; Thune says that won’t work either.

In the short term, the high-profile pressure campaign has Republican senators signaling they will have at least some extended debate on the bill, potentially stretching over multiple days or overnight.

But that debate will set up a charged vote that party leaders expect to lose.

So where does that leave us, besides mired in the wishful thinking and tedious arguments over Senate procedure that Thune can’t seem to escape?

Trump is already looking beyond Congress

It’s increasingly apparent that Trump is unlikely to get what he wants out of Congress. The U.S. House has already passed the current version of the SAVE America Act. Trump now wants lawmakers to add additional provisions to it, including sharp limitations on the use of mail ballots and two provisions unrelated to voting — restrictions on transgender athletes in women’s sports and gender-affirming surgery for minors.

There appears to be little appetite for that in either chamber. Many Republicans, for example, think the mail-voting restrictions will hurt their own voters.

Conventional wisdom is that Republicans could fare poorly in the midterm elections because voters are concerned about the economy, ongoing military action in Iran, and a host of other things, and because Trump’s own approval ratings have dropped.

But Trump has framed the election legislation as existential, arguing it will determine the outcome of the midterm elections — and setting up an opportunity to once again blame how the election was conducted if his party loses power.

Passing the version of the SAVE America Act that he wants “will guarantee the midterms,” Trump told lawmakers, warning, “If you don’t get it, big trouble, my opinion.”

Trump has no constitutional authority over elections, and federal judges have so far blocked key provisions of an executive order he issued last year on elections on that basis. He has promised to find a way to put at least some of his preferred policies in force for the midterm elections this year, anyway.

“There will be Voter I.D. for the Midterm Elections, whether approved by Congress or not!” he posted on social media last month, also saying he had “searched the depths of Legal Arguments not yet articulated or vetted on this subject, and will be presenting an irrefutable one in the very near future.”

Federal judges, of course, tend to prefer that arguments be articulated, and whether the arguments are in fact irrefutable will inevitably be determined in court.

Regardless of the merits of his eventual argument, any election official will tell you the November election is fast approaching, and lawmakers cannot flip a switch and reinvent voter identification standards nationwide. If new federal mandates emerge late — through legislation, executive action, or aggressive litigation — it could create operational chaos.

And that, more than a failed Senate vote, is where the real uncertainty lies.

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

Without a dedicated election committee, Wisconsin Senate lags on election policy

2026-03-02T10:00:00+00:00

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

When this legislative session began, Wisconsin Senate leaders made the unusual decision not to create a committee dedicated to election policy for the first time in nearly two decades. That choice has had a measurable consequence: The Senate has taken up far fewer election bills than the Assembly, and several measures that cleared the lower chamber are now stalled with no clear path forward.

Of the 19 election bills that Votebeat has tracked this legislative session, 18 have gotten at least a public committee hearing in the Assembly, compared with nine in the Senate. Fourteen of those bills passed the Assembly, compared with six in the Senate.

Even in a session when the Senate has generally moved more slowly than the Assembly on many issues — as of Feb. 25, the Assembly has passed 439 bills since the start of the current two-year session, while the Senate has passed 276 — the disparity is especially stark on elections.

Both chambers’ election activity is down compared to last session. With a dedicated election committee in the Senate, about 30 election bills received a committee hearing, compared with about 45 in the Assembly. Republicans have controlled both chambers for more than a decade.

“The lack of the dedicated committee has definitely changed things,” said Sen. Mark Spreitzer, a Democratic member of the local government and government operations committees. Without a clear Republican point person on election policy in the Senate, he said, the chamber is allowing the Assembly to drive most of the legislative action.

Some of the bills that have moved through the Assembly but haven’t passed the Senate include proposals to expand early voting hours and to bring the state in line with a 2022 federal law regarding the timing of casting electoral votes and certifying election results in presidential elections, designed to prevent the kind of post-election chaos that President Donald Trump and his allies sowed after the 2020 election.

Two other bills — one that would require ballots to include plain-language explanations of proposed constitutional amendments and another requiring early in-person voting hours in every municipality — have gotten a public hearing in the Senate but have since stalled.

Clerks have told Votebeat that some of the stalled bills would significantly improve their efficiency — including an omnibus proposal to create a system tracking voters adjudicated incompetent and also send voters text notifications on the status of their absentee ballots, said Rock County Clerk Lisa Tollefson, a Democrat. That proposal passed through the Assembly in November, but hasn’t been heard in the Senate.

Given the absence of a dedicated Senate election committee, Tollefson added, the Assembly has been doing the heavy lifting. But even with ready-made bills, the Senate does not appear to be eager to pass election legislation.

In every legislative session since 2009, there has been a Senate committee formally tasked with covering election legislation. Committee chairs typically serve as the go-to experts on their panels’ subject areas. They consult with lobbying groups, schedule public hearings and set up committee votes — giving them the power to advance or stall legislation.

But when election bills are scattered across multiple committees, there’s no clear point person in the Senate to guide them through the process.

In the absence of a dedicated elections committee in this session, several committee leaders declined to explain whether or when the stalled election bills might move. And some voting groups say it has made it harder to know who to consult with in the chamber to discuss election legislation.

At a WisPolitics event in Madison on Feb. 12, Senate Majority Leader Devin LeMahieu said that the absence of a Senate committee “doesn’t make it hard to pass election bills.” He added that there are “definitely avenues where election bills can run in the Senate,” including the Senate Committee on Government Operations, Labor and Economic Development and the Senate Committee on Transportation and Local Government.

LeMahieu, a Republican, didn’t respond to Votebeat’s request for comment. Sen. Dan Feyen, the chair of the government operations committee, didn’t respond to multiple requests for comment. Sen. Cory Tomczyk also, who chairs the local government committee, didn’t respond to a request for comment.

But even some of their fellow Republicans are seeing the effects. For example, Sen. Rachael Cabral-Guevara is the author of two of the bills languishing in the Senate, which would require and fund a certain number of early in-person voting hours in every municipality. Those reforms, she said, are “crucial to restoring confidence in our election process.”

She said in the Assembly, municipalities and clerks are working on a few details before the bills receive a final Senate vote, though both proposals passed the Assembly in November. The proposal to require the in-person hours got a Senate hearing in late January but has seen no activity since, while the bill to fund it hasn’t gotten a hearing at all.

There could still be a late flurry of committee activity. On Feb. 27, the Senate government operations committee approved the proposal to bring the state in line with new federal laws regulating presidential elections. But the next presidential race is 2 years away, and most of the bills that would affect all elections — not just presidential ones — remain stalled. Another bill to require the Wisconsin Elections Commission to hear complaints against itself was scheduled for a March 3 hearing.

With the legislative session entering its final stretch, though, the stalled bills face increasingly long odds. The last general floor session period of the biennium ends on March 19, and the Assembly is effectively finished for the session. That means the Senate only has a few weeks left to consider election bills that already cleared the lower chamber, and if the Senate modifies any of them, the Assembly is unlikely to return to approve the changes.

Alexander Shur is a reporter for Votebeat based in Wisconsin. Contact Alexander at ashur@votebeat.org.

Indiana bill would make early ballots traceable to voters

2026-02-23T10:00:00+00:00

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

For more than a century, American elections have operated around a simple promise: who you voted for is a secret. But a bill moving through the Indiana legislature would undermine that promise — at least for people who vote early.

House Bill 1359 would let counties have early voters feed their completed ballots directly into a scanning machine instead of placing them in a sealed secrecy envelope. It would then allow those ballots to be scanned starting on the first day of early voting, rather than waiting until closer to Election Day.

On its own, that process isn’t unusual — it’s similar to how ballots are handled at in-person polling places on Election Day. But the bill also authorizes counties to generate a unique identifier connected to each voter during early voting, print that number on the voter’s ballot, and allow officials to retract a scanned ballot if its voter is later found ineligible. That combination weakens the traditional separation between a voter’s identity and the ballot they cast.

Election officials and voting rights advocates argue those changes touch one of the most fundamental protections in modern democracy.

“Voters expect that when they cast a ballot, it is done privately, without the ability of clerks or staff to determine an individual’s actual vote,” Marion County Clerk Kate Sweeney Bell, a Democrat, said in a statement. The public is already “fatigued from political partisanship,” she said, and the additional requirements “will ramp up pressure on our staff and poll workers at the point of highest activity.”

The bill advanced out of committee the same day lawmakers added — without public testimony — an amendment that would reduce Indiana’s early voting period from 28 days to 16. If the measure passes, the changes would take effect before the May primary.

To understand why this matters, it helps to zoom out.

For the first half of American history, votes were cast publicly — often orally or by depositing colored party tickets into transparent containers — so that everyone present, including party operatives, knew exactly how each person voted. As a result, elections were rife with vote-buying, employer coercion, and party surveillance.

That started to change when states began adopting the secret ballot — also called the Australian ballot, after the country that exported the concept to the U.S. — in the 1880s and 1890s. States started printing their own ballots and setting up private voting booths so voters could mark their choices confidentially, fundamentally transforming elections from open spectacles into private acts.

Allowing ballots to be scanned within a system that uses voter-specific identifiers — and making those ballots retractable — is a step back in the opposite direction. Election scholars have long warned that even perceived weakening of ballot secrecy can erode public confidence, regardless of whether misuse occurs.

Support for the proposal has come primarily from Republican lawmakers, including Rep. Tim Wesco, who authored the bill, and Senate Elections Committee Chair Mike Gaskill, who offered the amendment to shorten early voting. Supporters have framed the changes as administrative improvements, arguing they would reduce costs, ease strain on county election offices, and allow for more efficient processing of early ballots.

During committee debate, however, lawmakers did not directly address how the early voting identifier system would affect the longstanding practice of keeping a voter’s identity separate from their ballot choices.

At least one Republican lawmaker, Sen. Greg Walker, voted against the piece because he opposes shortening early voting, citing concerns about its impact on voters in his district. So far, there have been no public reports of Republican lawmakers opposing the early voting identifier provision or raising concerns about its implications for ballot secrecy.

If you have questions about how ballots are handled in your county — or how this proposal would change that — shoot us an email. We want to hear from you.

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

What if everyone had to prove their citizenship to register to vote?

2026-02-16T10:00:00+00:00

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

Presidents’ Day is always the hardest holiday to shop for; it’s hard to know what to get the president in your life. But the U.S. House of Representatives got President Donald Trump exactly what he wanted when it passed the SAVE America Act on Wednesday.

The act, which passed with the support of all 217 House Republicans but only one Democrat, is a centerpiece of Trump’s agenda to exercise more federal oversight over elections and prevent illegal voting, which is already very rare. It’s essentially version 2.0 of the SAVE Act, which passed the House last year.

Like its predecessor, the SAVE America Act would require people who are registering to vote to provide proof of their U.S. citizenship. (Currently, new registrants only have to attest under penalty of perjury that they are citizens.) This version of the bill also adds a photo ID requirement for voters and requires states to run their voter rolls through the Department of Homeland Security’s Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements database to scan for noncitizens. All provisions of the bill would take effect immediately upon enactment.

But enactment is unlikely. The filibuster rule effectively means that legislation needs 60 votes to pass the Senate, and Republicans hold only a 53-47 majority in the upper chamber. Some Republicans are pushing to turn the filibuster from a procedural formality into a literal requirement that Democrats hold the floor and talk indefinitely in order to block the bill, which could allow the bill to pass with a simple majority if Democrats run out of steam. But that would derail the Senate for weeks, and Senate Majority Leader John Thune isn’t making encouraging noises.

If the bill does somehow become law, though, it would dramatically shake up how the 2026 elections run. Only three states currently require all newly registering voters to prove their citizenship, and 27 states don’t require photo IDs to vote, so the bill would suddenly impose new requirements on millions of Americans.

And there are serious questions about whether it’s even practically possible to implement them all in time for the midterm elections. Election officials are sounding the alarm about how the bill would force them to build out entirely new procedures without the time or money to do so.

The SAVE America Act could stymie potential voters

The proof-of-citizenship requirement in particular would be a hassle for potential voters and election officials alike. According to a 2023 survey conducted by SSRS on behalf of the University of Maryland and three voting-rights groups, 9% of voting-age citizens don’t have easy access to a document that proves their citizenship, such as a passport, birth certificate, or naturalization certificate.

Even people with the correct paperwork could be confused or inconvenienced too. Several election officials have compared a proof-of-citizenship requirement to the Transportation Security Administration’s slow rollout of REAL ID requirements. That policy was repeatedly delayed amid confusion over what documents were necessary to get a REAL ID and bottlenecks at driver’s license agencies.

The SAVE America Act would also effectively neuter the option to register to vote by mail or online, since new registrants would have to show up in person with their documentation.

In states that have already tried to implement proof-of-citizenship requirements, many eligible voters ended up getting disenfranchised. After Kansas started requiring proof of citizenship in 2013, 31,089 people were unable to register because they couldn’t prove their citizenship. That amounted to 12% of all the people who tried to register to vote in Kansas during that period. By contrast, the state could identify only 39 confirmed noncitizens who had registered to vote in the previous 14 years.

A court struck down Kansas’ proof-of-citizenship law in 2018.

An election administration ‘nightmare’

“This is bad for voters, but this will be a nightmare for election administrators,” Minnesota Secretary of State Steve Simon, a Democrat, told Votebeat.

Multiple election officials said that adding document verification to their already very full plates was a logistical burden that they were not prepared to assume. Many felt that it was simply not possible to implement a proof-of-citizenship requirement in time for the midterms, especially since the SAVE America Act does not provide them with additional funding to, for example, hire more staff to review documents.

“We are going to have significant challenges training all of our clerks and registrars to uniformly verify citizenship,” said Maine Secretary of State Shenna Bellows, a Democrat. “We will have to create the training from scratch, and we don’t have the personnel to travel to all 487 municipalities [in Maine] to make sure that they’re doing it right.”

“If Congress wants to do this,” she said, “they should give the states the proper runway of multiple years and millions of dollars of funding per state.”

Justin Riemer, the president of the group Restoring Integrity and Trust in Elections, which has advocated for proof-of-citizenship requirements, was more optimistic that states were up to the task. “States will undoubtedly have to move very quickly to implement this legislation,” he said, “but there is precedent, as states did [quickly change their voting procedures] during the COVID-19 pandemic.”

Riemer pointed out that a plurality of new voters already register through their state department of motor vehicles, whose staffs are already well trained in document verification thanks to the REAL ID requirements.

A proof-of-citizenship requirement would undeniably cost election officials more time and money, though. According to a social media post by Bob Page, the registrar of voters in Orange County, California, the county conducted an analysis last year of what it would have taken to prove the citizenship of the 633,568 people who registered to vote or updated their voter registration in 2024. The study found that, at an average of 10 minutes per applicant whose documentation needed to be verified, the county would have needed to hire 59 additional staffers at a cost of $6 million.

And according to a report from the Campaign Legal Center, proof-of-citizenship laws cost Kansas and Arizona (one of the three states where the requirement is currently in place) millions of dollars — in additional staffing, voter-education efforts, system upgrades, fixing errors, and defending against lawsuits over the requirements.

Ultimately, as long as the filibuster remains in place in the Senate, the SAVE America Act has little chance of becoming law before the midterms.

But that may be the point: The bill wasn’t introduced with the goal of making elections run more smoothly; it was introduced to make the point that elections aren’t as secure as they could be. If, as expected, the bill fails and voters don’t have to prove their citizenship or show photo ID in 2026, it could make it easier for Trump and his allies to claim that the results are tainted by fraud. That could be a different type of nightmare scenario.

Nathaniel Rakich is Votebeat’s managing editor and is based in Washington, D.C. Contact Nathaniel at nrakich@votebeat.org.

Votebeat editor-in-chief Carrie Levine contributed.

Arizona primary to move up 2 weeks under bipartisan legislation

2026-02-09T17:52:00+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.

Update, Feb. 9: Gov. Katie Hobbs signed the bill into law on Feb. 5, permanently moving Arizona’s primary date.

Update, Feb. 5: The Arizona Senate has passed this legislative proposal, sending it to Gov. Katie Hobbs. A spokesperson for her office declined to comment on whether she intends to sign the bill.

Arizona will permanently move up its state primary election date under a new law that will also give voters more time to fix signature problems on early ballots and codify where party observers may watch election activity.

The Arizona House voted unanimously on Feb. 2 to pass the legislation, which will move the primary from the first Tuesday in August to the second-to-last Tuesday in July. That will ensure that election officials can meet federally mandated deadlines to send out general election ballots to military and overseas voters, even if a statewide recount delays the finalization of the primary results.

The legislation passed the Arizona Senate with a similarly bipartisan vote on Thursday, and was signed by Democratic Gov. Katie Hobbs on Friday. The 2026 primary election date will now move from Aug. 4 to July 21.

This is the second time in recent years that lawmakers have sought to adjust the state’s election timeline on short notice. Arizona faced similar timing challenges in 2024, and after months of fraught negotiations, the state moved that year’s primary election ahead by a week. It also made a number of smaller, temporary changes, such as compressing the period for voters to fix missing and mismatched signatures on early ballots, a process known as ballot curing.

The new law required similar behind-the-scenes dealmaking to gain bipartisan support. Both chambers of the Arizona Legislature are controlled by Republicans, but a two-thirds vote is required to ensure that legislation will take effect immediately if passed. Without this emergency authorization, the law wouldn’t have taken effect until 90 days after the legislative session ends, which will likely be after the primary has already taken place.

The proposal also had to make it past Hobbs, who has set records throughout her first term with her extensive use of the veto pen.

The legislation passed the House after its sponsor — Republican Rep. Alexander Kolodin — offered a floor amendment that would reextend the ballot curing period.

Under the law passed in 2024, voters have five calendar days to cure early ballots. The legislation would change that to five business days starting in 2027. Because Arizona generally holds its elections on Tuesdays, that effectively moves the curing deadline from the Sunday after the election to the Tuesday after the election.

That change got voting access advocates on board. Alex Gulotta, state director for All Voting is Local, told Votebeat that the amendment represented a “significant victory for voters by making sure that the votes of all eligible voters are counted.” His organization had previously opposed the legislation.

Meanwhile, Kolodin framed the changes to observer access as a win for the GOP’s voting integrity efforts. He said the bill “strengthens security by making clear that counties must allow political party observers at every voting location.” Most counties in the state already did so.

The legislation’s changes may not hold for long. Jen Marson, executive director of the Arizona Association of Counties, said the bill permanently addresses timing challenges in non-presidential election years. But it won’t fully fix the issue in 2028, when recounts could still push general election results so late that election officials wouldn’t meet the federal deadline for sending presidential results to the U.S. Congress.

That means state lawmakers will have to address the problem in coming years — for a third time.

“We will have to revisit the cure window conversation,” said Marson, who was one of the chief negotiators on the legislation. “I would prefer to do it in 2027 so the calendar is set and we don’t have this anxious conversation in the year of the election.”

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

Republicans introduce sweeping election legislation, but it’s unlikely to become law

2026-01-30T18:19:01+00:00

Votebeat is a nonprofit news organization reporting on voting access and election administration across the U.S. Sign up for our free weekly newsletter to get the latest.

Congressional Republicans on Thursday redoubled their efforts to regulate elections nationwide, introducing two new bills that draw heavily from President Donald Trump’s agenda.

U.S. Rep. Bryan Steil, the chair of the House Administration Committee, unveiled the Make Elections Great Again Act, a bill that would overhaul several aspects of how elections are run, from limiting the use of mail voting to setting a national photo ID requirement for voting.

Later in the day, Sen. Mike Lee and Rep. Chip Roy introduced the SAVE America Act, which combines a photo ID requirement for voters with the SAVE Act, a bill passed by the House last year to require Americans to prove their citizenship when registering to vote.

Both the MEGA Act and SAVE America Act face long odds of becoming law anytime soon. Although the measures could pass the Republican-controlled House, they would almost certainly fail in the Senate, where the filibuster effectively means that legislation needs 60 votes to pass. (Republicans control the Senate only 53-47.) Given that both bills go farther than the SAVE Act, which has languished in the upper chamber for almost a year, there’s little reason to expect they would have any more luck in the Senate.

Trump and his allies have for years been intent on changing the way U.S. elections are run, building on their false assertions of widespread fraud. In recent days, billionaire Elon Musk has used his social-media site X to pressure senators to pass the SAVE Act, which may explain the timing of the two new bills.

Since the start of Trump’s second term, his administration has also attempted to exercise extraordinary power over election administration, suing 24 states and Washington, D.C., for not sharing comprehensive data on their registered voters and issuing a sweeping executive order on elections last year. The bills also come the same week that the FBI seized ballots from the 2020 election from an elections office in Fulton County, Georgia, in search of evidence of malfeasance.

So far, however, key provisions of Trump’s executive order have been struck down in court, and in recent months, he’s repeatedly called on Congress to pass legislation enacting his election-related priorities. The two proposals contain several policies from Trump’s 2025 executive order.

In November, the White House press secretary said the White House was working on a second executive order on elections, but one has yet to materialize.

What the Republican election bills would do

Should they ever pass, the SAVE America Act and especially the MEGA Act would represent the most transformative federal law aimed at reshaping national election administration in decades.

Both bills would:

Require Americans to provide proof of their U.S. citizenship (such as a passport) when registering to vote. Currently, new registrants must attest that they are a U.S. citizen, but most people aren’t required to provide documentation to prove it. According to Ballotpedia, Arizona, New Hampshire, and Wyoming are the only states that currently require proof of citizenship to register to vote.
Require voters to provide photo ID. According to the National Conference of State Legislatures, 23 states ask voters to provide photo IDs; in 13 states, non-photo IDs are acceptable, while 14 states plus Washington, D.C., don’t ask voters for ID. Notably, the ID requirement would apply not only to in-person voters, but also to mail voters, who would have to provide photocopies of their IDs (although the MEGA Act allows voters to provide unique identifying numbers, such as the last four digits of their Social Security number, instead). Currently, only Arkansas and North Carolina require mail voters to enclose copies of their IDs.
Require states to regularly check their voter rolls for noncitizens. For example, the MEGA Act would require states to compare their voter lists against the Department of Homeland Security’s citizenship database, known as SAVE, on at least a monthly basis. The Trump administration upgraded SAVE last year to make it easier to use for large-scale searches, and the department said in November that 26 states are now using it for voter verification.

The MEGA Act also includes a host of other provisions, such as:

Banning universal vote-by-mail. In other words, the eight states (plus Washington, D.C.) that automatically mail ballots to every voter would no longer be allowed to do so.
Prohibiting states from accepting mail ballots that arrive after Election Day. Currently, 14 states and Washington, D.C., do this, as long as the ballots are postmarked on time. The Supreme Court is expected to rule on the legality of this practice later this year.
Barring anyone except the voter, an immediate family member, or caregiver from possessing the voter’s ballot. Each state has different rules about who (if anyone) can return a mail voter’s ballot for them, but several have laws broad enough that allow third parties, such as campaign operatives, to do so — a practice Republicans have described as “ballot harvesting.”
Requiring states to provide hand-marked paper ballots. According to Verified Voting, nearly 70% of registered voters already live in a jurisdiction that uses hand-marked paper ballots. Most of the remaining jurisdictions use ballot-marking devices, which would be still legal under the bill, but they would need to provide voters with the option to hand-mark their ballots as well.
Outlawing ranked-choice voting. This would affect only a few jurisdictions. Alaska, Maine, and Washington, D.C., are the only places that use ranked-choice voting in federal elections in the regular course of business. However, Georgia also uses it for military and overseas voters, and Hawaii uses it for special elections.

The provisions in both bills would only apply to federal elections, forcing states to choose between changing their state election laws to match and administering federal and state elections differently. Either way, the bill would likely create more work for election officials. Given how many states would have to change their voting procedures, the enactment of either of these bills would send officials scrambling to adapt to unfamiliar requirements.

And if officials fail to live up to the law, they could be held liable in new ways. The MEGA Act explicitly allows the attorney general, and even private citizens, to file civil lawsuits against election officials for noncompliance.

Connecticut Secretary of State Stephanie Thomas, a Democrat, said that this type of broad mandate from the federal government “not only potentially disenfranchises voters, but it also ignores how under-resourced elections and secretaries of state are in general.”

Nathaniel Rakich is Votebeat’s managing editor and is based in Washington, D.C. Contact Nathaniel at nrakich@votebeat.org.

Correction, Feb. 6, 2026, 10:09 a.m.: This story has been corrected to reflect that Washington, D.C., will use ranked-choice voting starting in 2026 and that Georgia and Hawaii also use ranked-choice voting in some circumstances. It has also been corrected to reflect that the Department of Justice has sued 24 states and Washington, D.C., for not handing over their voter rolls, not 23 states.

With Trump orders tied up in court, congressional Republicans could take up an elections bill

2025-12-15T10:00:00+00:00

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

Republicans, led by President Donald Trump, have had a lot to say about the rules and laws that govern our elections. Changing them, though, is harder.

House Republicans are signaling plans for legislation to inscribe at least some of the party’s election-administration wish list into federal law, including changes to the landmark National Voter Registration Act that would make it easier to remove ineligible voters from the rolls.

Republicans have long accused states of failing to appropriately clean their voter rolls, and the U.S. Justice Department has filed a host of lawsuits seeking access to unredacted state voter rolls in what government lawyers have said is an effort to make sure states are complying with their obligations under federal law.

Trump issued a sweeping executive order on elections in March, and the White House said last month he is working on a second. But major provisions of the March order have so far been halted by the courts after federal judges found the president lacked the constitutional authority to enact them.

Congressional legislation would be on far firmer constitutional footing, but so far, efforts have stalled. Republicans’ highest-profile election bill — the SAVE Act, which would require documented proof of citizenship from anyone registering to vote — passed the U.S. House in April but has languished in the Senate.

Trump has repeatedly urged senators to eliminate the filibuster, a legislative procedure that effectively requires bills to secure the support of 60 senators rather than a simple majority, in order to pass voter ID requirements and what he described as “voter reform.” So far, though, senators have shown no interest in doing so, meaning election legislation cannot reach Trump’s desk without at least some Democratic support. (Republicans have a 53-47 majority in the Senate, including two independents who caucus with Democrats.)

Witnesses at a congressional hearing on potential updates to the NVRA on Wednesday suggested a different approach that lately has seemed somewhat out of vogue: bipartisanship.

“There was a time when election laws were viewed as an area of cooperation” between the political parties, said Mark Braden, an election lawyer with the firm BakerHostetler who is also a former chief counsel to the Republican National Committee and the Ohio Election Commission. That cooperation, he said, “is vital to the confidence in the process.”

Sophia Lin Lakin, director of the American Civil Liberties Union’s Voting Rights Project, echoed the sentiment, though the two weren’t advocating for the same policies. “I urge Congress to return to its bipartisan tradition of strengthening our voting system by advancing measures that expand access and improve accuracy,” such as same-day and automatic voter registration and more federal funding for election administration, she said.

Despite those calls, there have been no signs of an emerging bipartisan bill on elections. Rather, Republican members of Congress at the hearing repeatedly highlighted what they said is the need to clarify and tighten the standards election officials around the country use to remove ineligible voters from voter rolls.

“Election officials benefit from clear and unambiguous laws which will help them to carry out their duties and to ensure voter lists are accurate and up to date,” said Rep. Laurel Lee, a Republican and former Florida secretary of state who chairs the election-focused House subcommittee that held the hearing.

Another witness, Michael Morley, a professor at the Florida State University College of Law and the faculty director of the FSU Election Law Center, brought up potential changes to the NVRA that could eventually wind up in legislation.

While many people exaggerate the extent to which noncitizens vote, he said, “it is reasonable for the public to expect steps to be taken to ensure noncitizens are not inadvertently added to the voter registration rolls.” The NVRA could be amended to allow states to request information reasonably related to confirming an applicant’s eligibility, he said. He also suggested that states could be required to use a database maintained by the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services to search for potential noncitizens on voter rolls. Although several states have taken advantage of the database, which the Trump administration recently overhauled and made easier to use, they are not currently required to do so, and some election officials have raised questions about its accuracy and privacy protections.

The NVRA currently prohibits state election officials from systemically removing ineligible voters within 90 days of a federal election. Morley said that between the primary and general elections, that restriction adds up to a considerable portion of time and could potentially be shortened.

Witnesses also touched on a host of other things, including the importance of clean voter lists in states that use mail ballots, and it isn’t clear what might ultimately make it into legislation. Or, without the bipartisan support that witnesses talked about, law.

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

A big question looming over future redistricting: Who should count?

2025-12-11T10:00:00+00:00

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

The impacts of the latest fight over Texas’ political maps are still reverberating around the state, but there are other debates on the horizon.

Future political representation could hinge on President Donald Trump’s renewed push to exclude at least some noncitizens from the population counts that help determine how political power is distributed in the U.S.

In Texas, where Republicans pushed through a rare midcycle redistricting this year to try to maintain their advantage in Congress after the 2026 midterm elections, experts say that excluding noncitizens when drawing districts could open another way for the GOP to tighten its grip on the state Legislature and congressional delegation.

In addition, many experts and critics worry it could ultimately place some Texas communities into larger, less cohesive districts, while diluting the political influence of Latinos and other minority groups who have accounted for much of the state’s population gain in recent decades. Adding questions about citizenship to the U.S. census could also lead to more undercounting of Latinos, they warn, a problem that has plagued previous censuses.

Read the full story.

Wisconsin clerks hope new law can alleviate statewide election official shortage

2025-12-09T20:47:26+00:00

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

Wisconsin clerks say two decisions on legislation this week — a new law expanding towns’ ability to hire clerks and a veto that blocks broader standing to sue election officials — will help ease mounting pressure on local election offices, which have faced record turnover and increasing legal threats.

The new law allows small towns to more easily hire clerks that live outside of municipal limits, a change clerks say is urgently needed as finding small-town clerks has become harder in recent years amid increased scrutiny, new laws and ever-evolving rules. As the new law moved through the Legislature, some small towns ran elections with no clerks at all.

“There are lots of townships that will benefit from this,” said Marathon County Clerk Kim Trueblood, a Republican. “It’s going to help tremendously.”

In the past, towns with fewer than 2,500 residents had to hold a referendum to authorize appointing clerks instead of electing them. That took time and the election requirement restricted who could serve, since elected clerks — unlike appointed clerks — must live within municipal boundaries.

The new law allows towns to switch to appointing clerks after a vote at a town meeting.

It also eliminates another hurdle: In the past, even if a town approved the switch, it couldn’t take effect until the end of a term. The law lets towns make the change immediately if the clerk position is vacant or becomes vacant.

That could be critical: Between 2020 and 2024, more than 700 of Wisconsin’s municipal clerks left their posts, the highest churn in the nation, according to the Bipartisan Policy Center. Trueblood said this proposal won’t be a complete fix to the clerk shortage, but will go a long way toward easing it by allowing municipalities to recruit more broadly.

Likely beneficiaries of the new law include the Town of Wausau, whose longtime clerk retired late last year. Town supervisors then appointed a town resident, who quit after two weeks, forcing supervisors to collectively assume the clerk’s duties for the April election.

In that election, the town put forth a referendum to permanently switch to appointing clerks, but voters rejected it by a narrow margin — something that Town Supervisor Sharon Hunter said was a matter of people not understanding why the measure was critical. The town also elected a clerk, but that same clerk quit in September and the town is once again without a clerk.

“There’s just a lot of different responsibilities,” Hunter said. “And I don’t think people realize that it’s not like in the olden days.”

Hunter added that she’s “very excited” about the new law.

“Elections are coming,” she said, “so we really need to find someone very quickly.”

Veto maintains high bars to appealing complaints

Clerks also welcomed Evers’ Friday veto of a bill that would have made it easier to sue election officials by expanding who has standing to appeal Wisconsin Elections Commission decisions in court.

The Democratic governor’s veto preserves a Wisconsin Supreme Court decision issued earlier this year that limits who can appeal WEC decisions to those who “suffer an injury to a legally recognized interest.” Republicans wrote the bill to expand standing to any eligible voter who files a complaint, regardless of whether they suffered harm — a change clerks warned would overwhelm election offices and the courts

In his veto message, Evers echoed clerks’ concerns, saying the proposal would “open the floodgates to frivolous lawsuits that not only burden our courts, but our election systems as well.”

But Republicans said that despite clerks’ objections, the veto will make it difficult or even impossible to hold election officials accountable for breaking the law.

State Sen. Van Wanggaard, the Republican who wrote the bill, said it could stop a wide variety of complaints from going to court.

“The little guy gets screwed again,” he said in a statement. “This veto makes WEC an unanswerable body whose judgment can never be questioned by anyone.”

In the past, many lawsuits against clerks and other election officials began as administrative complaints filed with WEC before being appealed to court. Filing a complaint with the agency is the legally required first step for most election-related challenges, unless they are brought by district attorneys or the attorney general.

Democrats and liberals have filed complaints over concerns about towns that switched to hand-counting ballots and alleged inaccuracies on candidate nomination forms. Republicans and conservatives have filed complaints over allegedly being denied poll worker positions. Other complaints have involved allegations that clerks refused to accept ballots at polling places, and unproven accusations of ballot tampering.

The Wisconsin Supreme Court decision that prompted the bill halted a lawsuit that challenged the legality of a mobile voting van in Racine. The court did not settle the underlying issue, instead dismissing the case because the liberals who hold a majority on the court determined the plaintiff had no standing.

Given the veto, that situation could recur, with legal questions about elections being left open because cases seeking to resolve them are ultimately dismissed over standing.

At the federal level, the U.S. Supreme Court earlier this year heard oral arguments in an Illinois case over the legal standard political candidates must meet to challenge state election laws. A decision is pending.

Alexander Shur is a reporter for Votebeat based in Wisconsin. Contact Alexander at ashur@votebeat.org.

What Texans need to know about Prop 16, the ballot question on citizenship and voting

2025-10-24T09:00:00+00:00

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

Texans’ ballots for next month’s election include 17 proposed amendments to the state constitution, including one clarifying that a voter must be a United States citizen.

Republicans in Texas and across the country have for years been raising alarm about the possibility of noncitizens casting ballots, even though such cases are rare, and people who vote illegally risk serious consequences, including deportation.

The amendment wouldn’t have much practical effect, as it essentially restates what’s already in state law. But it would “make it crystal clear under the state constitution that if you’re not a U.S. citizen you’re not allowed to vote in Texas,” Gov. Greg Abbott said in a social media post.

An effort to require all Texas to show proof of citizenship to register to vote failed to pass in the legislature this year.

Constitutional amendments are the only state measures voters in Texas will see on their ballot this year. They will appear at the top of the ballot and above any local races or measures.

Early voting will run until Oct. 31, and Election Day is Nov. 4. The deadline for counties to receive applications to vote by mail is Oct. 24. Mail ballots must be received by 7 p.m. on Election Day to be counted.

Here’s what you need to know about the citizenship proposal:

What does the proposed constitutional amendment look like?

You’ll see it as Proposition 16 on your ballot. It was introduced as Senate Joint Resolution 37 and written by Sen. Brian Birdwell, a Republican from North Texas. The Legislature approved its addition to the ballot during the regular session.

It says, “the constitutional amendment clarifying that a voter must be a United States citizen,” and voters can select yes or no.

What would it do?

It would amend Article 6 of the Texas Constitution, which lists groups that aren’t allowed to vote in Texas. Article 6 currently prohibits voting by people under 18 years old; anyone who has been deemed incompetent by a court; and anyone who has been convicted of a felony. The proposed amendment would add to that list “persons who are not citizens of the United States.”

However, being a U.S. citizen is already a requirement to vote in federal elections under federal law, and state law says that only U.S. citizens and Texas residents are eligible to vote. That’s why Texans are asked to attest whether they are U.S. citizens when filling out a voter registration card. Anyone who attests on the form that they are not citizens would not be allowed to register.

Noncitizens who vote face state and federal criminal charges and could be at risk of deportation.

Even if it’s approved by voters, the measure would not require voters to show documentary proof – such as a birth certificate or a U.S. passport — to register to vote.

What are the arguments for and against the amendment?

Birdwell said during a public hearing on the proposal earlier this year, that the language in the state constitution would affirm citizenship as a requirement for voting and complement federal law.

Some voting rights activists opposing the amendment said at the time that it would be redundant, since the citizenship requirement is already in place. Others worried the language may mislead voters into believing noncitizens are voting en masse.

There’s been little campaigning over the amendment on either side.

Have other states considered similar measures?

Yes. South Dakota, Idaho, Iowa, Kentucky, Missouri, North Carolina, South Carolina, and Oklahoma recently passed similar constitutional amendments, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures.

And last fall, voters in Wisconsin overwhelmingly approved a GOP-backed measure to change constitutional language that says “every” U.S. citizen 18 or older has a right to vote. The new wording says “only” a U.S. citizen 18 or older can vote in national, state, and local elections, effectively closing the door to any local ordinances that would allow noncitizens to vote. The amendment passed with roughly 70% of the vote.

Natalia Contreras covers election administration and voting access for Votebeat in partnership with the Texas Tribune. She’s based in Corpus Christi. Contact Natalia at ncontreras@votebeat.org.

State Rep. Scott Krug emerges as GOP’s voice of pragmatism on Wisconsin election law

2025-09-24T12:28:25+00:00

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

PRESTON, Wisconsin — On a quiet Friday at Mo’s Bar, a lakeside dive where regulars gossip over beer and fried perch, Rep. Scott Krug blended in easily.

He nursed a Miller Lite and gestured out the window toward Big Roche a Cri, one of the lakes that he said had taught him everything he needed to know about surviving the Capitol’s sharpest fights.

“I was the water guy in the Legislature for years and years,” said Krug, an eight-term Republican who represents a region of farms, lakes, and rivers stretching south and west from Wisconsin Rapids. Instead of sticking to the party line, he said, he tried to balance the interests of farmers, the tourism industry, and clean water — ultimately winning support from both conservation and agricultural groups.

“I don’t give a shit about getting my head kicked in by both sides,” Krug said.

That willingness to buck party orthodoxy has mattered even more in recent years amid Wisconsin’s fierce battles over election administration. As many Republicans leaned into Donald Trump’s false claims about fraud, and the Assembly’s elections committee became a stage for conspiracy theories, Krug carved out a different role: the pragmatist trying to keep the system running.

He took over as chair of the committee in late 2022, after his predecessor’s hardline tactics cost her influence. This session, Krug has moved up to assistant majority leader, a role that puts him at the center of GOP caucus strategy. That might mean winnowing 18 election ideas down to five bills, huddling with Wisconsin Elections Commission appointees, talking with clerks across the state, or working the halls to find a path for bipartisan proposals long stuck in gridlock.

It has been hard for Krug to overcome the conspiracy theories embraced by a small GOP faction and rally his colleagues behind his proposed election reforms. When Republicans do unite on election policy, their bills usually face Democratic opposition and a veto from Gov. Tony Evers.

Still, Krug has kept pushing for the policies that clerks have long asked for, like allowing absentee ballots to be processed the day before an election.

He said he measures his success not only on whether he can get his proposals enacted, but also on whether he can change the tone of the debate, increase confidence in elections, and cool the conspiracy talk on the elections committee and in his party, even as Trump and his allies help fuel it.

“Messaging,” he said, “has become more important than actual policy.”

The era Krug replaced

Krug took over the election committee from Rep. Janel Brandtjen, a Trump loyalist who regularly invited conspiracy theorists to testify. Groups like True the Vote and people like Peter Bernegger, a prolific election litigant, used the committee’s platform to veer into unsubstantiated accusations of malfeasance or outright fraud by election officials.

Brandtjen also routinely exceeded her authority as chair, issuing invalid subpoenas to counties and other election offices.

She also embraced former state Supreme Court Justice Michael Gableman’s partisan review of the 2020 election, which floated the idea of an unconstitutional decertification of the election, threatened to jail mayors, and ultimately cost taxpayers more than $2 million.

While Trump praised Brandtjen’s loyalty, her standing within her own caucus weakened. Assembly Republicans voted to bar her from closed caucus meetings in 2022, writing to her that past issues “led our caucus to lose trust in you.” Brandtjen dismissed the note as “petty.”

Krug saw an opportunity to restore order, and told Assembly Speaker Robin Vos: “Give me the election committee,” he recalled. Vos handed him the gavel that December.

At the Wisconsin state Capitol, election administration fights carry national weight — but some lawmakers see openings for real progress.

The tone changes, while legislation stalls

The tone shifted immediately.

In one of the committee’s first sessions, Krug held public hearings on bipartisan bills to limit polling place closures and compensate local governments for holding special elections. In the next session, he held a hearing on another bipartisan bill to increase penalties for harming election officials.

He didn’t shy away from giving space to Republican-backed priorities either — including a bill to specially mark noncitizens’ IDs as not valid for voting, and an informational hearing to investigate whether noncitizens were on the state’s voter rolls. The first was vetoed by Evers, and the second didn’t go far after the Department of Transportation declined to turn over the necessary data. (Krug told Votebeat he thought the number was minuscule but still wanted the department to share its data.)

Still, for clerks and legislators across the state, Krug has been a welcome change.

Rock County Clerk Lisa Tollefson, who has been advocating for clerks in the Legislature for about eight years, told Votebeat that Krug was the best chair she’s worked with so far. “He wants to understand the system the most,” she said.

Rep. Lisa Subeck, a Madison Democrat and former member of the election committee, said Krug brought a civility back to the committee that had disappeared after the 2020 election. She also praised some of his ideas, though she questioned the effectiveness of his advocacy, noting many proposals he supported never got Assembly approval.

Krug said a lot of the obstacles come from the state Senate, which blocked the Monday processing bill last year. The Senate, he said, has more “further-outs” on elections.

Kim Trueblood, the Republican county clerk in Marathon County, called Krug’s leadership “refreshing” but said she doesn’t know what to do to convince some GOP senators “that the bogeyman under the bed is not real.”

Krug said he’ll keep trying, and his record suggests he won’t shy away from intraparty disagreements.

He tried to calm down the rhetoric after 2024 U.S. Senate candidate Eric Hovde delayed conceding for two weeks, blaming his loss in part on “improbable” absentee ballot totals in Milwaukee. Krug recalled Hovde raising the issue again in a phone call during this year’s Supreme Court election. Krug, who was observing Milwaukee’s absentee-ballot counting facility, said he told Hovde: “I’m telling you, it’s not the issue here.”

Hovde said he couldn’t recall the exchange. He told Votebeat that while he does not blame his loss on central count, he’s still skeptical of the process.

Other states, meanwhile, are still battling the ghosts of 2020 in their legislative committees. In neighboring Michigan, Republicans rebranded their House’s Elections Committee into the Election Integrity Committee and placed it in the hands of a legislator who believes the 2020 election was stolen, and regularly invites the type of firebrands Brandtjen once welcomed. In Georgia and Arizona, hearings on election-related legislation regularly erupt into partisan shouting matches.

Vos, the Assembly speaker, said Krug has treated election concerns as “a problem to be solved,” rather than “milked.” He praised Krug for being practical with legislation rather than holding out until he found perfection.

“I think he’s really done a good job of bringing people together,” Vos continued. “He’s been an incredible leader to try to showcase that it doesn’t have to always be partisan.”

Walking the GOP tightrope on election policy

Krug stepped down as committee chair this session, shifting to vice chair and taking on a new role as the Assembly’s assistant majority leader, where he’ll help rally Republican votes. He said he hopes to bring the same spirit of compromise to his leadership role.

The new role means he can write his own bills for the election committee, which he was unable to do last session, as committee chairs generally are not allowed to preside over their own legislation.

Rep. Scott Krug has collected bobbleheads since 2012, and it has become a running competition with Wisconsin Gov. Tony Evers. Krug's most prized bobbleheads are his his collection of players from the legendary 1982 Brewers team — the only year the team ever went to the World Series.

Krug said one of his biggest hurdles this session is dealing with election conspiracy theorists — a faction he argues has lost influence in Wisconsin but remains disruptive.

The tougher challenge, he added, will continue to come from Washington. Trump and his allies have called for banning mail voting, overhauling voting machine standards, requiring proof of citizenship to vote, and using the Department of Justice to scrutinize the Wisconsin Elections Commission.

Krug has tried to give where he can, incorporating some provisions of a Trump executive order on elections into draft legislation.

But his tone changed when Trump posted on social media that he wanted to ban mail-in voting and criticized voting machines. “My whole goal is to get results quicker,” he said, “not to go back to hand-counting and wait for results until the Friday after the election.”

Usually, when his constituents or other Assembly members come to him espousing these ideas, he can calm them down with “truth and data,” a strategy he says works until another press release comes from the Trump administration.

“And that’s our struggle,” he said. “You see this ebb and flow, and it’s all based on what comes out of Washington. So we put the fire out. He stokes it, then I put the fire out, he stokes it.”

Krug, a real estate agent, parent of six, and grandparent, said he’ll stay busy even if his tactics make him politically unpopular. If his constituents force him out for telling the truth, he said, he’ll just go sell more houses — and keep adding to his bobblehead collection, a running competition with Evers.

Republican Scott Krug is in his eighth term in the state Assembly, representing a large section of Central Wisconsin.

Krug sees promising signs in his party

At Mo’s Bar, where workers and patrons greet Krug like a neighbor, it’s clear his independence hasn’t yet cost him local support. Despite the headwinds, he insists the atmosphere around elections has changed.

“I feel it when I talk to everybody,” he said. “It used to be my first conversation when I walked in here: ‘What are you gonna do about the goddamn election?’ It’s over. People don’t do that.”

Buoyed by that shift, Krug is scheduled to introduce several election-related bills on Wednesday, telling Votebeat he expects most to win bipartisan support. The measures would let clerks process ballots the day before an election, add new auditing requirements, regulate the use of drop boxes, and repeal a law critics say puts ballot privacy at risk.

He also sees promising signs of improvement from within his own party.

In April — when Hovde and U.S. Sen. Ron Johnson were still criticizing Milwaukee’s election operation — losing Republican Supreme Court candidate Brad Schimel conceded defeat without caveat or complaint.

As some supporters booed him, Schimel said, “You’ve gotta accept the results.”

Krug said he hoped the concession would be a sign to other GOP candidates that the “shine has worn off” of holding radical election positions.

“I’ll never find a way to fix it entirely,” he said, but he has to keep at it, because the effort will shape how Wisconsinites view the Legislature on all other issues.

“Everything starts from elections,” he said.

Alexander Shur is a reporter for Votebeat based in Wisconsin. Contact Alexander at ashur@votebeat.org.

Texas lawmakers pass election bill to retain limits on same-day registration changes

2025-09-03T19:21:16+00:00

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

Update, Sep. 3: Lawmakers in the Texas House and Senate approved a bill to enact a proposal sought by Gov. Greg Abbott, and it’s now headed to his desk. Under the bill, which revokes a change that was scheduled to take effect Sept. 1, voters can update their address at the polls, but have to wait 30 days for that change to take effect. Meanwhile, they can vote a ballot with races tied to their old address.

Updated, Aug. 27: This story was updated to include new information from Gov. Greg Abbott’s office.

Texas Gov. Greg Abbott called on lawmakers Monday to prohibit same-day voter registration, in an apparent attempt to reverse a measure passed earlier this year that relaxed rules for voters who made last-minute updates to their addresses.

Texas does not allow same-day registration for new applicants (23 other states do), but under the legislation passed this year with bipartisan support, Senate Bill 2217, voters could update their addresses and immediately cast a ballot based on their new precinct or district, as long as the move was within the county. That law was scheduled to go into effect Sept. 1.

Shortly after Abbott’s announcement, state Rep. Briscoe Cain, a Republican from East Texas, announced on social media that he had filed a bill that would effectively prevent that measure from going into effect.

Abbott clarified late Tuesday in a message to lawmakers that he was seeking legislation about “accepting a voter with an address that is not current” and about a voter’s registration taking “immediate effect” after election officials receive a change-of-address notice.

Cain’s bill would maintain the status quo, in which voters can update their address at the polls, but have to wait 30 days for that change to take effect. Their ballot would include races tied to their old address, the one on file in the state voter registration system before the update.

Abbott’s office didn’t immediately respond to questions about why he added the issue to the agenda for the ongoing special legislative session.

Senate Bill 2217, which aimed to make election data reporting and reconciliation consistent across the state, was written by state Sen. Bryan Hughes, a Republican from East Texas, and enacted during this year’s regular legislative session.

But the provision allowing voters to cast ballots immediately based on same-day address changes was added through an amendment proposed by Republican state Rep. Matt Shaheen of North Texas, who chairs the House Committee on Elections. It passed the full House with bipartisan support.

Earlier this month, during an election law training for election officials hosted by the Texas secretary of state, some election administrators said they were worried about the new requirement.

Trudy Hancock, head of the elections department in Brazos County, home to Texas A&M University, said students move constantly, and her workers handle change-of-address and statement-of-residency forms at every election. Given the volume of changes, she said, processing them immediately would require her staff to work longer hours each day the polls are open. That’s because the voter’s record has to be updated right away before the information can be uploaded to the state’s registration database, as the new law requires.

“We have to come up with some kind of process to go to each early voting location, pick up those statements-of-residence forms, get them back to the office, process them all before we can upload the history — all before 10 o’clock the next morning,” Hancock said.

And since the voter’s address would be changed by election workers at the polling location, without additional address and mapping verification steps that election officials typically take, Hancock said there’s a risk that voters could get the wrong ballot.

“Our election workers are experienced, but they can make mistakes,” she said. “Not all of them are familiar with every single area of the county.”

Natalia Contreras covers election administration and voting access for Votebeat in partnership with the Texas Tribune. She is based in Corpus Christi. Contact Natalia at ncontreras@votebeat.org.

Do you have questions about ranked choice voting? Share them with us.

2025-08-22T18:53:40+00:00

Votebeat is a nonprofit news organization reporting on voting access and election administration across the U.S. Sign up for our free weekly newsletter to get the latest.

Most Americans are accustomed to a fairly simple election system — a plurality system — where voters pick a single candidate on the ballot, and whoever gets the most votes wins. But a growing number of jurisdictions are adopting or considering a different system called ranked choice voting.

In this system, voters rank the candidates on the ballot according to preference, and the rankings help determine the winner.

New York City has used ranked choice voting for local primary elections since 2021. Alaska and Maine use ranked choice voting for statewide offices, and several counties and municipalities across the country use it for specific offices. This year, an advocacy group in Michigan is working to get a referendum on the 2026 ballot for a constitutional amendment to allow ranked choice voting.

But ranked choice voting is still a new, unfamiliar concept for most Americans, and it involves a counting process that’s more complicated than in a plurality election.

Votebeat is working on a project to better explain how ranked choice voting works, why people support or oppose it, and what to expect if your state, county, or municipality adopts it.

But first, we want to know what you’re wondering about when it comes to ranked choice voting. What parts are unclear to you? Do you have questions about a specific recent election that used ranked choice voting, like New York City’s Democratic primary?

Use the form below to tell us what you want to know, so we can get answers to your questions. You can also reach out to us at community@votebeat.org.

If you don’t see the form, head to this link to open it in a new window.

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Federal appeals court upholds ID requirements for voting by mail

2025-08-06T01:35:21+00:00

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

This story was first published by The Texas Tribune, a nonprofit, nonpartisan media organization that informs Texans — and engages with them — about public policy, politics, government and statewide issues.

A federal appeals court has upheld Texas’ requirement that potential voters must list their identification information in their application for a mail-in ballot.

In Texas, voting by mail is only available for certain groups of people, including elderly voters and people with disabilities. Under Senate Bill 1 passed in 2021, voters must also include an ID number — such as a driver’s license number — on both the vote-by-mail applications and the mail-in ballots and both numbers need to match. Opponents of the law said this provision discriminated against voters with disabilities and that it would not meaningfully cut down on voter fraud.

In a Monday ruling, a panel from the U.S. Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals found that the updated requirement does not violate federal law. It also reversed a lower court’s decision.

“We have no difficulty concluding that this ID number requirement fully complies with a provision of federal law known by the parties as the materiality provision of the 1964 Civil Rights Act,” wrote Judge James Ho, a Trump appointee.

Judge Patrick Higginbotham and Judge Don Willett, who were appointed under the Reagan and Trump administrations, respectively, joined Ho’s ruling.

Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton lauded the ruling Tuesday.

“Voter ID is one of the most crucial tools in the battle against election fraud, and I’m pleased to see the court affirm our fundamental right to defend the integrity of our democratic process,” he said in a news release.

Prior to this decision, the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Texas had ruled in 2023 that the requirements infringed on the Civil Rights Act. Though later that year, Paxton’s office was able to stop that decision from going into effect.

These voter ID requirements were also the target of legal challenges from several civil rights groups, along with other provisions of SB 1.

Groups that were part of this case — including the League of Women Voters of Texas, OCA-Greater Houston and Rev Up Texas — didn’t immediately respond to comment requests from The Texas Tribune Tuesday.

A recent study from the Brennan Center for Justice at NYU Law School found that the state’s requirements pushed many voters whose mail ballots or vote-by-mail applications were rejected during the 2022 primary to change their method — or not vote at all.

Ranked choice voting in Michigan? What to know about a controversial ballot initiative.

2025-06-26T18:43:25+00:00

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

Michigan could become the most populous jurisdiction in the country to adopt a complex and controversial voting method under a proposal headed to the Board of State Canvassers for review on Friday.

An initiative led by Rank MI Vote aims to get a proposal for a ranked choice voting system added to the 2026 Michigan ballot as a potential amendment to the state constitution.

For now, the state canvassers will consider only whether the description of the proposed ballot question is accurate and meets state guidelines, so organizers can begin collecting signatures on petitions.

Getting enough signatures and winning voter support for the actual proposal will be a bigger hurdle: A survey released Thursday found that 65% of Michiganders oppose ranked choice voting, with opposition coming from people in both parties.

How does ranked choice voting work?

Ranked choice voting would be a significant change from the way Michiganders vote now in races with several candidates. It works like this: Instead of voters choosing a single candidate for each office, as they do now, they would rank the candidates in order of preference. If one candidate wins an outright majority, that person is the winner. Otherwise, when ballots are tabulated, the candidate who gets the least votes is eliminated from contention, and totals are recalculated using the second choice of that candidate’s supporters. This process continues until two candidates remain, and the one who gets the highest number of votes wins.

The method is already used in Maine and Alaska, as well as in some municipal elections in New York City, Minneapolis, San Francisco, and other cities around the U.S.

Supporters argue that it produces winners with broader support.

“In a three-way gubernatorial race, for example, under the current system, three candidates could split the vote so that the winning candidate receives less than 50% of the vote, yet they’ll still be representing all Michiganders,” Pat Zabawa, executive director of Rank MI Vote, told Votebeat. He said ranked choice voting allows voters to support multiple candidates and helps ensure a majority winner, even if that person isn’t everyone’s first choice.

Opponents of ranked choice say that such a majority would be manufactured rather than a true mandate. “You’re going to see in the first round where the public actually is, and everything else is just glossing over those divisions,” said Jason Snead, executive director of the Honest Elections Project and a strong opponent of ranked choice voting.

“We’re trying to pretend that the person that wins with 60% of the vote actually has 60% support,” Snead told Votebeat shortly after testifying after the House Election Integrity Committee on Tuesday. “But when you’re pulling in second, third, fourth rankings, it’s hard to know what that actually means.”

Some Michigan municipalities are ready to adopt it

Ranked choice voting has been used in Michigan before, but only because it was required as part of a federal lawsuit. The U.S. Justice Department sued the city of Eastpointe in 2017, saying the city violated the Voting Rights Act through “racially polarized voting patterns” that allowed white voters to “dilute the black community’s voice and lead to a discriminatory result.” As part of the settlement, the city used ranked choice voting in 2019 and 2020 for local elections.

Beyond that, though, ranked choice voting isn’t allowed in Michigan under the state’s Home Rule City Act. Several municipalities have passed measures to adopt it if state law changes. Royal Oak, East Lansing, and Kalamazoo all approved it for use in 2023, for example, joining Ann Arbor and Ferndale, which did so earlier. But none of those communities can actually use it under current law.

That’s still more flexibility than many states allow. More than a dozen states have outright banned ranked choice voting in recent years, and several others rejected it through ballot measures last year. Where it is in use, election officials have had to conduct extensive campaigns explaining how to use it.

Zabawa is confident Michigan will be different. More than 1,000 people have already volunteered to help gather signatures, he said, the result of the group’s efforts to work on voting-related issues over the past several years in Michigan.

“With any electoral change, voters are interested in learning about who it advantages and how it affects them,” he said. “The reason why voters, after ranked choice voting is used, like ranked choice voting is because they learned it’s a simple, nonpartisan solution that empowers voters themselves.”

‘Ballot exhaustion’: The risk of disenfranchisement

Rank MI Vote’s proposal would have Michigan use ranked choice voting for most major elections, including federal and statewide races. The proposal would call for allowing voters to rank at least four more candidates than the number of positions to be nominated — so five rankings for an office with only a single winner.

That could lengthen already long ballots. It also allows for “ballot exhaustion,” as opponents like to point out: If a voter ranks only two candidates, and both are eliminated from contention, for example, their ballot is “exhausted,” or no longer considered in future rounds.

“One word I think of is ‘disenfranchisement’ at its finest,” Rep. Rachelle Smit, a Republican from Martin and the chair of the House Election Integrity Committee, said Tuesday after hearing from Snead and others on concerns about ranked choice voting.

The proposal also includes a few other measures in what appears to be an attempt to win over a broad coalition of voters. If approved, it would amend the state constitution to require ranked choice voting but also to require paper ballots — a popular conservative talking point, but also something Michigan already does — and to require primaries to be at least 140 days before a general election. That would all but eliminate Michigan’s relatively small (and potentially expensive) August elections, and push them to no later than mid-June, likely combining it with the May local elections.

The proposal is set to appear before the Board of State Canvassers on Friday to finalize the petition language, and organizers could begin collecting signatures on petitions as soon as this week.

Updated, June 30: This story was updated to include a link to survey results on views of ranked choice voting.

Hayley Harding is a reporter for Votebeat based in Michigan. Contact Hayley at hharding@votebeat.org.

Texas Legislature approved changes to election law, but some key GOP proposals stalled

2025-06-20T11:24:28+00:00

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

After considering a number of bills that would significantly reshape election administration and voting access in the state, Texas lawmakers ultimately approved only a few, including legislation that would alter the schedule of the 12-day early-voting period to increase access.

They also passed measures aimed at reducing rejections of mail-voting applications and ballots, and added new restrictions on curbside voting, but held off on some more controversial proposals.

Among the bills that didn’t advance were Senate Bill 16, one of Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick’s priority bills, which would have imposed a strict requirement for voters to provide documentary proof of citizenship, and a measure that would have given state Attorney General Ken Paxton more authority to prosecute election crimes. Bills that would have permitted online voter registration, audits of hand-count results, and guns in polling sites also stalled.

Here’s a look at the election bills discussed during the latest legislative session, and how they turned out:

Texas is set to expand early voting, a change that could delay partial preliminary results

Legislation that expanded early voting had evolved considerably before its passage. The bill as initially drafted would have banned vote centers, a model offered by some counties where voters can cast ballots at any polling place in the county. The proposal prompted pushback from counties that said vote centers save taxpayers millions of dollars and make voting more convenient.

After a series of changes, Senate Bill 2753 became “a compromise,” said the bill’s author, Sen. Bob Hall of North Texas. The bill retains the required 12-day early voting period, but starts it later, and eliminates a three-day gap between the end of early voting and Election Day.

That schedule gives voters an extra weekend of access to early voting. And the bill requires that voting be available for nine hours on Sundays, instead of six, and that voting be open on any holidays during the early voting period.

But the changes mean that partial vote tallies from the early ballots, which are typically released shortly after polls close on Election Day, won’t be available until later, when all polling locations have closed and reported tallies. That could push total results later, election administrators told Votebeat.

Some election officials said the changes would require hiring additional election workers to work longer hours, as well as more voting equipment and possibly additional polling locations. Counties would have to cover those costs, as the state didn’t allocate additional funding.

The bill directs the Texas secretary of state to consult with counties and report to the Legislature on whether they are prepared to implement the changes by August 2027.

Voting by mail will get a little easier with new processes for handling errors, more legible instructions

After Texas’ overhaul of election law in 2021, which created new ID requirements for voting by mail, more voters across the state saw their mail-ballot applications or ballots being rejected because of errors.

The 2021 law created a process for voters to correct errors on mail ballot applications and to track online whether the application has been received and processed. This year’s legislation was meant to refine that process.

Senate Bill 2964, by Sen. Bryan Hughes, a Republican from Central Texas, will allow election officials to call and email voters to notify them of errors before their application or ballot is processed, and it allows voters to correct the errors by mail or in person.

Lawmakers also approved a bill requiring the instructions on a vote-by-mail application to be printed in larger type, to make them more legible for people with disabilities and elderly voters. House Bill 2259 also requires the application to be available in various languages, “appropriate to the demographic composition of this state.”

Both bills were approved with bipartisan support and are set to take effect in September.

Curbside voting will be more restricted

Under current law, if a voter is “physically unable to enter the polling place,” the voter can ask that an election worker bring a ballot to the entrance of the polling place or to a car parked at a designated spot. The law requires all polling sites to offer such curbside voting.

In the past year, some election officials noticed more voters using curbside voting. When state Rep. Ryan Guillen, a Republican from South Texas, filed House Bill 521 this session, he told the House Committee on Elections that he was concerned about potential misuse of the practice.

HB 521 now requires anyone using curbside voting to sign a form swearing under penalty of perjury that they are unable to enter the polling place without personal assistance or a likelihood of injuring their health.

In addition, as a check against potential misuse, the bill requires election officials to ask anyone providing transportation to a user of curbside voting whether they have done so for multiple voters. The transportation provider will need to sign a form, with their name and address, stating that they are assisting a voter.

Failing to fill out such forms will be a Class A misdemeanor, punishable by up to a year in jail or a fine of up to $4,000.

Proof of citizenship won’t be required to register to vote in Texas

SB 16 was among the most sweeping proof-of-citizenship proposals for voters introduced anywhere in the country, applying not only to new applicants for voter registration but also retroactively to 18.6 million voters on the rolls. Voting rights advocates warned that the bill would disenfranchise eligible voters, and discourage future voters by making registration and voting more burdensome.

But SB 16 and its companion in the House missed a key deadline and died without a full House vote. The legislation’s Republican sponsors, Hughes and Rep. Carrie Isaac of Central Texas, did not respond to requests for comment about why the bill, a key Republican priority, didn’t get a floor vote.

Attorney general is denied broader powers to prosecute election crimes

Paxton’s office won’t gain new powers to prosecute election crimes, after the House and Senate failed to work out their differences on how much leeway to grant the state’s top legal official in such cases.

House Bill 5138 was filed by state Rep. Matt Shaheen, a Republican from North Texas. The Senate passed a version that would have given the attorney general’s office the power to unilaterally prosecute local election crimes when a county declines to do so. The House had previously agreed to grant Paxton’s office more powers to prosecute such cases, but only after local prosecutors considered the case.

Similar bills were also filed in 2023 after the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals, the state’s highest criminal court, found Paxton’s office does not have authority to independently prosecute criminal election cases in trial courts without the request of a local prosecutor. Those bills also failed, and the House that year voted to impeach Paxton on misconduct allegations that included bribery and abuse of office. The Senate later acquitted Paxton.

Texas won’t offer online voter registration

Texas lawmakers held their first hearing in a decade on legislation that would allow people to register online to vote and revamp the state’s current paper-based system. But the legislation, House Bill 311, filed by Rep. John Bucy of Austin, missed key deadlines and failed to move forward. At least five similar bills filed this session by Democratic lawmakers did not even get committee hearings.

Counties can keep mailing out unsolicited voter registration applications

Lawmakers filed bills to prohibit counties from sending out voter registration forms to people who didn’t request them, and bar the use of state money to support such mailings by other groups. Senate Bill 511, championed by Sen. Paul Bettencourt of Houston, passed the Senate but failed to meet key deadlines in the House.

The measure was filed in response to moves by two Democratic-led counties to mail out voter registration forms to hundreds of thousands of residents, unsolicited. In each county, only a small share of applications were returned, but the effort sparked a backlash. Bettencourt said the mailings could make it easier for ineligible people to register and cast ballots.

No guns allowed in polling locations

Bills that would have allowed poll workers to carry concealed handguns inside polling places, or allowed anyone to carry a concealed weapon inside a polling location, stalled. The bills, House Bill 1128 and House Bill 1794, were championed by Isaac and Rep. Carl Tepper, also a Republican, but failed to meet key deadlines to move forward.

Hand-counted ballots still can’t be audited without a full manual recount

For ballots that are tabulated electronically, Texas law requires partial recounts to check the accuracy of election results. But there’s no provision requiring such audits for ballots counted by hand. In fact, under current law, such audits are possible only through a full manual recount.

The risk of that became clearer when Gillespie County Republicans hand-counted thousands of ballots during the March 2024 primary, rather than using electronic tabulators. The group made multiple errors, and the results were never verified.

Rep. Ellen Troxclair, a Republican whose district includes Gillespie, filed House Bill 3113, which would have made it easier to verify the results by requiring a ballot design that allowed for electronic tabulation. The bill received support from poll workers and election officials across the state, including Gillespie County’s elections administrator, but was left pending without a vote in the Senate.

Correction, Sep. 8, 2025: An earlier version of this story misidentified the bill restricting curbside voting. It is House Bill 521, not 511.

Natalia Contreras is a reporter for Votebeat in partnership with the Texas Tribune. She’s based in Corpus Christi. Contact Natalia at ncontreras@votebeat.org.

Texas is about to expand early voting. Here’s what that means for voters and counties.

2025-06-06T09:00:00+00:00

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

Texans will have a new schedule for early voting in coming years under new legislation that starts the voting period later but slides it right up to Election Day, eliminating the three-day break in between.

Experts say Senate Bill 2753, which lawmakers approved this week, will likely boost turnout, as it includes more time for voting on weekends. The author of the bill, Sen. Bob Hall, a Republican from North Texas, told Votebeat that the change also “simplifies the process” and would reduce the cost of election operations and equipment.

But local election officials said they aren’t so sure of that, and are still determining how it will work and what it could cost counties. The bill doesn’t allocate any funding for counties to implement the changes.

And there’s one notable side effect of taking away the gap after the early-voting period: Partial vote tallies from the early ballots, which are typically released shortly after polls close on Election Day, won’t be available until later, election administrators said.

The bill is headed to Gov. Greg Abbott’s desk for his signature, though it can become law without it.

The changes have to go into effect no later than August 2027. Some election officials warned that they are likely to need additional election workers to work longer hours to comply with the requirements, as well as more voting equipment and possibly additional polling locations.

“These are just things that we don’t know yet because we haven’t run an election in this model yet,” said Jennifer Doinoff, Hays County elections administrator and the legislative committee chair for the Texas Association of County Election Officials. “It’s something we’re going to have to look at and build from the ground up.”

It’s not yet clear when counties would begin implementing the changes. The bill directs the Texas secretary of state to adopt rules and procedures to implement the new timeline and provide a report telling the Texas Legislature “as soon as practicable” after Sept. 1 that the agency “has consulted with county election officials and is confident that the counties in this state are prepared.”

Also, the Legislature could make changes based on the secretary of state’s report, because there is a full regular legislative session in 2027 before SB 2753’s new early voting timeline has to be used.

How the legislation changes early voting

Currently, during general elections that have county and state offices on the ballot, Texas offers 12 days of early voting, starting the 17th day before Election Day and ending four days before Election Day. This allows for only a single weekend of voting.

The new law would also require 12 days of early voting, but the period would begin on a Thursday and run for 12 days straight, including two weekends, right up to Election Day. In addition, Sunday voting hours would be extended from six to nine hours a day, and early voting would also be available on any holidays during that period.

While the number of days doesn’t change, election officials said the new schedule will eliminate a treasured break for workers before Election Day, and they worry they’ll lose workers without it. Some officials also said it can be hard to find people to work Sundays.

In Collin County, the early-voting staffers typically also work on Election Day, said Kaleb Breaux, the county’s elections administrator.

“It’s a laborious process for them, just mentally and physically,” Breaux said. “By the time they get to that last week of early voting, they’re just worn out.”

Election offices also used the break to set up equipment for Election Day voting, which uses a different set of machines.

Election officials will have to work out whether and how to pay poll workers for any overtime. The bill didn’t allocate any funds for counties to pay poll workers.

Hall, the bill author, played down the concerns about staffing, and said he expects some workers would prefer to work on the weekend. “It’s a matter of organization and management,” he said.

Hall said he doesn’t anticipate new personnel costs since the total number of days the polls will be open won’t change.

The bill will also require changes to the way election officials allocate their space and equipment. It will require any location used as an early-voting polling place to also be used as an Election Day polling place, a new mandate. But in some counties, finding and leasing facilities is difficult.

“We’ll have to completely reconfigure early voting,” Trudy Hancock, the Brazos County elections administrator said.

How the bill could delay reporting of election results

Election officials are also anticipating changes in the timeline for posting election results on Election Day. Early-voting ballots will have to be tabulated at the same time as Election Day ballots, and the extra volume will add to the time needed to complete the security and paperwork steps required after polls close. So tallies from each polling place could take longer to come in, Breaux said.

Hall said he doesn’t expect the timeline for full election results to change very much. The partial results that may be delayed “serve absolutely no purpose in the election process other than to give people a piece of information as quickly as possible,” he said.

“I expect they’ll be able to get the total votes not much later if the counties handle it right,” he said.

The schedule change aligns Texas more closely with 22 other states that have a single voting period that runs right up to Election Day, including Arkansas, Missouri, Colorado, Indiana, California and Illinois, according to the Voting Rights Lab. Hall told Votebeat he didn’t model the bill after any specific state.

In some of those states, making voting accessible the day before Election Day has helped increase voter turnout, said Daniel Griffith, senior policy director at Secure Democracy Foundation.

“That Monday just right before Election Day, that’s when a lot of folks are really thinking about the election,” Griffith said. “The later you kind of push that last early voting day, the more participation you get.”

Colorado, which is primarily a vote-by-mail state, implemented a single voting period over a decade ago, and it has worked smoothly. For in-person voting, the entire state uses a countywide voting model — where people can vote at any polling location in their county — for the entire voting period. That means election officials have fewer polling locations to staff.

Fewer than half of Texas’ 254 counties use the countywide model. In the rest, voters have to cast their ballot at their assigned precinct, which typically requires more polling locations on Election Day. The number of early-voting sites varies from county to county, and not all of them use the same sites on Election Day.

Texas counties will need funds and resources to implement the changes in the bill, said Jennifer Morrell, CEO and co-founder of The Elections Group, an election administration consulting firm. Colorado reimburses local jurisdictions when there are state or federal candidates on the ballot, Morrell said, and adjusts the amount for changes in poll worker pay and other costs. Texas will need to do the same, she said.

“Costs go up: paper, ink, equipment,” Morrell said. “You can’t just make stuff up and then expect a local jurisdiction to just do it without additional funding. And even if election officials get creative, they can’t maintain it for long.”

Natalia Contreras is a reporter for Votebeat in partnership with the Texas Tribune. She’s based in Corpus Christi. Contact Natalia at ncontreras@votebeat.org.

Texas Legislature deadlocks on giving attorney general more authority to crack down on election crimes

2025-06-01T13:22:53+00:00

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

Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton appears unlikely to gain new powers to prosecute election crimes after the House and Senate failed Saturday to reach a deadline to work out their differences on how much leeway to grant the state’s top legal office in such cases.

That development in the waning days of the regular 2025 legislative session ending Monday comes two years after the House voted to impeach Paxton on misconduct allegations that included bribery and abuse of office. The Senate later acquitted Paxton.

House Bill 5138 was filed by state Rep. Matt Shaheen, a Republican from North Texas. The Senate passed a version that would have given the attorney general’s office the power to unilaterally prosecute local election crimes when a county fails to do so. The House had previously agreed to grant Paxton’s office more powers to prosecute such cases, but only after local prosecutors considered the case.

Shaheen filed the bill after the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals, the state’s highest criminal court, found Paxton’s office does not have authority to independently prosecute criminal election cases in trial courts without the request of a local prosecutor.

Paxton later targeted three of the Republican judges who reached that decision when they were up for reelection, leading a successful campaign to oust them during the 2024 GOP primary. The legislation would have explicitly granted Paxton the authority he sought in the court case.

Paxton is running for U.S. Senate against Republican incumbent John Cornyn, creating an opening for a new state attorney general to take office in 2027.

Under the Senate’s version, local law enforcement would be required to send a report to the attorney general’s office if it believes there is probable cause to suspect that an election crime has been committed. The attorney general’s office would then have the authority to prosecute. Local prosecutors and law enforcement would be required to turn over any information they have about election crime investigations to the attorney general’s office.

Under the House’s version of the bill, law enforcement agencies would be required to notify the attorney general’s office when reporting a potential election crime to local prosecutors. The attorney general could investigate only if the local prosecutor took no action on those reports for six months. And under the bill, local prosecutors could challenge the attorney general’s assertion of jurisdiction to investigate.

A conference committee failed to reach an agreement by midnight Saturday, effectively killing the bill. Texas Gov. Greg Abbott could call a special session on the issue if he chooses.

Paxton has made targeting election-related crimes a priority since he took office in 2015. He has pursued more than 300 investigations of suspected crimes by voters but has successfully convicted only a handful.

Republican lawmakers filed similar legislation in 2023 to give him the authority to step into local investigations, but those bills failed to pass. That was the same regular session in which the House impeached Paxton.

Some voting rights advocates have said giving the Texas attorney general more power over local law enforcement offices is unconstitutional. They warned that the bill seemed aimed at increasing election prosecutions, and potentially intimidating voters and local election officials.

Natalia Contreras covers election administration and voting access for Votebeat in partnership with the Texas Tribune. She is based in Corpus Christi. Contact Natalia at ncontreras@votebeat.org

New study shows lasting effects of Texas’ ID requirements to vote by mail

2025-05-28T10:00:00+00:00

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

Some county election officials across Texas say the number of people voting by mail has dropped since 2020, but they’re not sure why.

New research suggests that the recent overhaul of state election laws could explain some of the drop.

A study from the nonpartisan Brennan Center for Justice at NYU Law School looked at Texas voters whose mail ballots or applications to vote by mail were rejected in the 2022 primary, after the state enacted new identification requirements for mail ballots, among other changes. Many of those voters, the study found, appear to have switched to other voting methods or, in some cases, stopped voting.

The study found that 30,000 voters in that primary — or 1 out of 7 voters who started the process to vote by mail — had either their application or ballot rejected, and that “roughly 90% of these individuals did not find another way to participate in the 2022 primary.”

The authors said their findings show the potentially lasting effects of restrictive voting policies on even the most engaged voters.

About 85% of voters whose applications or ballots were rejected had voted in general elections in 2016, 2018, and 2020, said co-author Kevin Morris, a senior research fellow and voting policy scholar with the Brennan Center’s Democracy Program.

“This is a group of people that are super highly engaged in the political process,” Morris told Votebeat. “They have a long history and habit of voting, so to see these effects among them is a big deal.”

The peer-reviewed study, co-authored with political scientists from Barnard College and Tennessee State University, is set to be published later this year in the Journal of Politics and was shared with Votebeat.

After Senate Bill 1, more rejections, less participation

Texas has long had strict limits on voting by mail, allowing it only for certain groups of people, including voters age 65 and up and people with disabilities. Voters who are eligible must apply to use mail ballots each year. If their application is accepted for a primary election, they’ll automatically get a mail ballot for that year’s general election as well. If the application is rejected, they have to reapply.

In 2021, state lawmakers tightened the restrictions as part of an election law overhaul called Senate Bill 1. The legislation required voters to write their driver’s license or personal identification number, or the last four digits of their Social Security number, on the mail ballot application or mail ballot envelope — whichever number they originally used to register. If the ID number was missing or didn’t match the number on file, the application or ballot could be rejected.

The March 2022 primary, the first statewide election after the legislation took effect, saw a dramatic increase in rejection rates: 12,000 absentee ballot applications and more than 24,000 mail ballots were rejected, amounting to a 12% rejection rate statewide, far higher than in previous years. In the 2020 presidential election, by comparison, the rejection rate was 1%.

Mail-voting applications and ballots of Asian, Latino, and Black Texans were rejected at much higher rates than those of white voters after the ID requirement was added, according to an earlier study by the Brennan Center.

For the more recent study, researchers obtained individual-level data on mail-voting ballot applications and mail ballots in the 2022 Texas primary from litigation documents and public-records requests to the Texas Secretary of State. They looked at the demographics and the voting history of the roughly 215,000 Texans who requested a mail ballot for that primary, and drilled down to the 30,000 voters who had either their application or ballot rejected.

More than 3,000 voters whose mail-voting applications were rejected voted in person instead in the 2022 primary.

Out of the more than 18,000 voters whose mail ballots were rejected, only 344 voted in person. The others did not ultimately vote in the primary.

The study said the rejections increased what it called the “cost of voting,” because voters had to “try to sort out why their mail ballot did not arrive, re-apply for an absentee ballot, and seek out details about where to vote in-person.”

“I can’t speak to any law other than SB 1,” Morris said, “but this does provide some evidence that the effect of being disenfranchised does make people even less likely to vote into the future.”

County officials observe the impact of new restrictions

Before the passage of SB 1, mail voters were not required to provide identification numbers, and although they still had to apply each year, election officials were allowed to send them reminders to resubmit their applications. The new law made such unsolicited reminders illegal.

In some counties, election officials said they’ve personally observed how the law’s requirements have affected voter participation and the way people vote.

Lisa Hayes, the elections administrator in Guadalupe County east of San Antonio, said that participation in mail voting rose in 2020, when the state allowed voters to hand-deliver their mail-in ballot during the early voting period because of the pandemic. During that year’s presidential election, Guadalupe County sent out more than 8,000 mail-in ballots to qualifying voters, and 90% were returned.

Since the new requirements passed in 2021, fewer people are voting by mail, Hayes said, and she’s seen voters become more frustrated.

For the November 2022 general election, the county sent out 3,354 mail-in ballots to voters. The return rate for that election was 81%. The return rate for the November 2024 presidential election went up slightly up to 84%, she said.

SB 1 included a provision that allows voters to correct errors on their application. Hayes said that in the period leading up to an election, her office is constantly answering calls from frustrated voters whose applications need to be corrected and resubmitted.

If the voter’s mail-voting application is missing one of the two required ID numbers, a signature, or the explanation of why they qualify to vote by mail, the elections office mails the voter a notice and a new application so they can correct it. Hayes said if voters correct one issue but fail to fix another, they must start the process over.

“Unfortunately, the voters have to jump through so many hoops to get into that corrective-action loop, that they just get frustrated and they give up,” Hayes said. In some cases, voters will send in two or three corrected applications before they get approved. Others opt to vote in person instead.

“These are the voters we’re supposed to be trying to help,” she said. “They need the help. They need to vote by mail. It’s not just a convenience for them, it’s a need. So of course they’re frustrated.”

Diana Leggett, 83, volunteers helping people who live at assisted-living facilities and nursing homes in Cooke and Grayson counties in North Texas. In 2022, she focused on helping seniors to navigate the new mail ballot rules.

“When you’re 90 years old, you’ve voted all your life, but you sure as heck don’t remember what you put down the first time you registered to vote,” Leggett said, referring to the requirement that ID numbers match what’s on file. “Some don’t have a driver’s license anymore or don’t know the number.”

When residents had their mail ballot applications rejected, she said, they often didn’t try again.

To keep voters from becoming frustrated, election officials have had to find ways to ensure voters are aware of the requirements to vote by mail.

Kaleb Breaux, election administrator for Collin County in North Texas, said his staff recalls the 2022 primary as a “rough mail ballot election.”

The county had over 7,000 mail-in ballots, and over 700 were rejected due to the new ID requirements, he said. To help voters, he said, his office began to insert instructions with the applications and the ballots “to help draw voters’ attention” to the sections with the new requirements. And it helped.

In the November general election, Breaux said, the county rejected just 85 ballots for ID requirement issues.

Natalia Contreras covers election administration and voting access for Votebeat in partnership with the Texas Tribune. She is based in Corpus Christi. Contact Natalia at ncontreras@votebeat.org.

Texas’ proof-of-citizenship bill for voters fizzles at end of legislative session

2025-05-28T05:14:15+00:00

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

A high-profile bill that would have required documented proof of citizenship from Texas voters appears likely dead after it missed a key House deadline Tuesday, an unceremonious outcome for a Republican legislative priority.

Senate Bill 16 had 50 Republican co-sponsors in the House, and supporters widely expected it to sail through the chamber. The bill passed the Senate last month along party lines and with little debate. Republicans and allied groups around the country have been aggressively pushing for such citizenship proof measures at the state and federal level.

SB 16 and its companion, House Bill 5337, were among the most sweeping proof-of-citizenship proposals introduced anywhere in the country, applying not only to new applicants for voter registration but also retroactively to 18.6 million voters already registered in the state. Voting rights advocates warned that the bill would have disenfranchised eligible voters, and discouraged future voters by making registration and voting more burdensome.

Under the bill, voters who failed to provide proof of citizenship would have been allowed to cast ballots only in congressional races — and would have been barred from voting by mail. Mail voting is already tightly limited in Texas.

Gov. Greg Abbott could still call a special session on the issue, and Republicans are moving forward with a plan to ask voters to approve a constitutional amendment affirming that only U.S. citizens are permitted to vote in Texas — something already established under Texas law. On Monday, Abbott signed a bill to add the measure to the ballot in the November constitutional amendment election. The proposed amendment does not include the enforcement and maintenance provisions to check for citizenship that were included in SB 16.

The two Central Texas Republicans who carried the proof-of-citizenship bills in their respective chambers, state Sen. Bryan Hughes and state Rep. Carrie Isaac, did not respond to Votebeat’s requests for comment Tuesday.

Some experts said the bill’s failure to reach a House vote may be due to the GOP-led Legislature’s waning focus on voting and election reform this session. In addition, the policy is “legally, procedurally, and financially complicated,” said Brandon Rottinghaus, a political science professor at the University of Houston. “It’s just a challenge to make this a new policy out of whole cloth, which would require a significant amount of investment in terms of time and money to facilitate and then legally to defend it.”

Some voting rights advocates who opposed the legislation said Tuesday that they were “cautiously optimistic” about its seeming demise. Lawmakers could attempt to revive the proposal by attaching its provisions as an amendment to another bill, but that would be difficult due to its complexity and scope, said Luis Figueroa, legislative and policy director for Every Texan, a nonprofit organization that advocates for equitable public policies.

“I think the leadership started to realize that it wasn’t as easy as they thought,” Figueroa said. “There’s a lot of people who would be affected by this. And ultimately, I think what prevailed was that they realized how this was going to create chaos at the polls.”

Inflated claims about noncitizens on the rolls fueled bill

In an analysis that accompanied the House version, Isaac cited an announcement by Abbott last fall claiming that 6,500 noncitizens had been removed from Texas voter rolls prior to 2024. But a joint investigation by Votebeat, Texas Tribune and ProPublica found Abbott’s numbers were inflated and, in some instances, wrong; the governor’s office later edited its own press release to change the description to say those removed were “potential” noncitizens.

In reality, the state removed only 581 people as noncitizens over three years. The rest of the 6,500 had simply failed to respond to a notice asking them to confirm their citizenship, which doesn’t mean they weren’t citizens. The investigation found that some eligible citizens had been flagged as potential noncitizens and removed from the rolls.

During a House Elections Committee debate on the bill earlier this month, state Rep. John Bucy, a Democrat from Austin and committee vice chair, described the data Isaac cited as “misleading” and pointed out that election officials already check the rolls for potential noncitizens.

Bucy said the scrutiny of the bill helped his colleagues in the House understand “how poorly this bill was thought out and written and what its impacts would have been.”

“It was done to harm people and also to scare people out of the process,” Bucy told Votebeat in an interview Tuesday. “It was a terrible voter suppression bill. We’re able to celebrate that this bad bill is not going to become law this session.”

Texas bill modeled after Arizona law blocked by federal courts

The legislation was modeled after an Arizona law that requires proof of citizenship to vote in state and local elections. But the Texas bill went further: It also would have barred voters who don’t provide citizenship proof from voting in presidential elections, a restriction currently blocked by federal courts in Arizona.

The Texas legislation would have also required local election officials to continually verify voters’ citizenship status — and subjected the officials to potential felony charges for any lapses. In Arizona, a similar requirement led to widespread confusion after a state error made it hard for officials to administer the law consistently.

Election administrators in Texas warned lawmakers that the bill could confuse voters about eligibility requirements and prove difficult to administer. They also had questions about how implementation would work at the county and state levels.

According to the bill’s fiscal note, the Texas Secretary of State’s Office would need to overhaul the state’s voter registration system to track proof of citizenship — something it currently does not do. The projected cost: $578,931 in 2026, followed by $84,000 annually.

The office said it would need two additional staff members to conduct citizenship verification reviews and to coordinate with counties, each costing $70,662 a year, plus benefits and other expenses totaling about $45,000 per year. The agency also estimated that the positions would require roughly $16,000 in setup costs in 2026.

That didn’t include costs that would have been borne by the counties.

Bucy said the Texas Legislature will likely continue to push for ways to ensure that only eligible Texans are registering to vote by looking at similar policies in other states.

“Hopefully by having a more thoughtful conversation, our counterparts across the aisle will realize how effective our current system already is,” Bucy said.

Read more of Votebeat’s coverage of Texas’ push for a proof-of-citizenship requirement:

Natalia Contreras covers election administration and voting access for Votebeat in partnership with the Texas Tribune. She is based in Corpus Christi. Contact Natalia at ncontreras@votebeat.org.

Wisconsin election officials seek more flexibility in proposed early-voting mandate

2025-05-27T10:00:00+00:00

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

Wisconsin Republicans are proposing an expansion of early voting, with new requirements for municipalities statewide, but some local officials say the one-size-fits-all mandate wouldn’t make sense for Wisconsin’s smallest communities.

The proposal would require every municipality in Wisconsin, regardless of its size, to offer at least 20 hours of in-person absentee voting at the clerk’s office, or an alternative site, for each election. The bill’s authors say they want to reimburse local governments for the added costs, though they haven’t yet clarified how they would do that.

Sen. Rachael Cabral-Guevara, a Republican, said she wrote the bill after noticing the stark difference in early-voting availability between rural and urban municipalities.

In the Fox Valley cities that used to be part of her district — Appleton, Oshkosh, and Neenah — early voting was widely available, she said. But in many of the rural areas that she began serving after the latest redistricting cycle, she said, “nobody has early voting.”

She argues the proposal would provide more flexibility for voters and offer an alternative for those who are uncomfortable voting by mail.

Local election officials generally welcome increased access, but worry about the 20-hour mandate being a burden on smaller communities.

Acknowledging the pushback, Cabral-Guevara said, “Why should we have hesitation about giving people the opportunity of voting? Why shouldn’t there be equity across the state for rural versus urban?”

In-person absentee voting access varies across Wisconsin

In cities like Madison and Milwaukee, voters have nearly two weeks before an election to cast an in-person absentee ballot. They can vote in one of multiple locations, and at almost any time of the day.

That isn’t the case in rural Wisconsin.

Some rural municipalities provide just a one- or two-hour window for in-person absentee voting during that two-week period. In others, in-person early voting is done by appointment only at a clerk’s home, which acts as an official office for that purpose. Many have no clear policy at all for in-person absentee voting policy.

Clerks in smaller towns expressed mixed feelings about the proposed changes.

In Luck, a northwest Wisconsin town with about 900 residents, Patsy Gustafson serves as a part-time clerk, generally working three or four hours per week, and arranging in-person early voting by appointment only. This proposal would require her to work over double her normal hours during the early-voting period.

“I think I’d be sitting around a lot of that time for nothing, but hopefully it would make more people that wouldn’t otherwise vote come,” she said.

Gustafson said she supports state reimbursement to municipalities — “Elections are expensive,” she said — but questions how the state would cover her added costs, especially since she’s salaried.

Cabral-Guevara said the funding formula is still being finalized.

In Elcho, a town of about 1,200 people in northern Langlade County, the 20-hour requirement would be unnecessary, Clerk Lyn Olenski told Votebeat.

“I guess I wouldn’t want that,” she said about the proposal. “We don’t have that many people that want to vote early.”

The 20-hour mandate would make even less sense for smaller municipalities, Olenski said.

“If we had 100 people, I sure wouldn’t want to sit in there for 20 hours,” she said.

Cabral-Guevara said she believes behavior could shift as early voting becomes more accessible.

“I believe that there is a duty as a clerk to make sure that there is easy access for people to be able to vote,” Cabral-Guevara said. “And if they’re sitting around, well, then they can find other things to do if they would like.”

That may be wishful thinking in places like the Village of Yuba, which has only 43 registered voters. Clerk James Ueeck, who also works full time for the county in another role, said he would have to request time off from his main job to be able to provide 20 hours of early voting.

Even if every voter in the village cast a ballot early, the total time required wouldn’t come close to 20 hours. And his office would still have to keep polls open on Election Day.

“For us, it makes no sense,” he said. “I would rather just leave it where I can do it by appointment.”

Ueeck added that many clerks in Richland County also work full-time jobs and might resign their clerk positions if the mandate becomes law.

Rep. Scott Krug, a Republican from Rome and co-author of the measure, told Votebeat that he has heard concerns from small-town clerks over the 20-hour requirement. He said he’s open to tweaking the measure — for example, requiring fewer hours in communities with fewer than 250 voters. But he said there must be “access everywhere” to early voting.

Similar versions in Washington County and Connecticut

The Republican proposal mirrors a local initiative in Washington County, where officials have offered to cover the costs for municipalities that voluntarily expand early voting hours.

For the April 2025 election, the county compensated municipalities at 150% of the added cost for extending their early voting hours beyond what they were in the April 2023 election. About 90% of the municipalities in the county participated. Unlike the state proposal, Washington County’s plan had no mandated minimum hours.

Early voting has been taking off across the country, too. At this point, 47 states offer some version of in-person early voting. In Connecticut, which recently passed an early-voting initiative, the program requires every municipality to be open between four and 14 days for early voting, depending on the election, regardless of population size.

In Union, Connecticut — a town of just 800 residents — Clerk Heidi Bradrick said only eight voters showed up during the 14 days of early voting in May.

“I understand their desire to have it,” she said, “but they definitely need to take into account the size of the municipality. We always laugh, like, ‘What if we get everybody to vote the first day? Can we close?’”

Alexander Shur is a reporter for Votebeat based in Wisconsin. Contact Alexander at ashur@votebeat.org.

Texas online voter-registration measure gets a hearing, but runs out of time

2025-05-15T22:00:08+00:00

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

Texas lawmakers held their first hearing in a decade on legislation that would allow people to register to vote online, a step that would revamp the current paper-based system, reduce costs, and bring Texas in line with most other states.

But the legislation missed key deadlines and has no clear path to passage this session. At least five similar bills filed this session by Democratic lawmakers did not get committee hearings.

The one that got a hearing Thursday is championed by state Rep. John Bucy, an Austin Democrat. House Bill 311 would direct the Texas Secretary of State’s Office to work with the Texas Department of Public Safety and the state’s Department of Information Resources to implement online voter registration.

Bucy acknowledged the bill’s slim chances, but told Votebeat that the hearing was a significant step toward implementing online voter registration in Texas.

“I’ve met with my colleagues over the years. I’ve met with the Secretary of State’s Office to learn the logistics of it,” Bucy said. “It seems like the appetite for it is growing.”

He has filed the legislation every year since he took office in 2019.

“I want people to have a fresh lens at looking at online voter registration,” he said. “Forty states have done it. They’ve done it because it’s efficient, because it’s safe and it’s accurate, and that’s what we should be doing here in Texas.”

Texas, which has more than 18 million registered voters, is one of only eight states without online voter registration.

Most people in the state have to fill out a paper form, whether they are registering through an election office or while getting a new driver’s license or state ID at the Texas Department of Public Safety. Only people who already have a Texas driver’s license and are engaging in an online transaction with DPS, such as renewing their license or updating their address, can use a DPS online portal to register to vote.

A Votebeat investigation last year found that Texas’ paper-based voter registration system has for years led to data-entry errors, delays, and in some cases, the disenfranchisement of voters. Manually entering the information of hundreds and thousands of voters ahead of an election also requires some counties to hire additional staff who must work long hours at taxpayer expense.

Bucy pointed out that if legislation to require proof-of-citizenship in Texas become law, it could create additional backlogs in the paper-based system.

The Texas legislation is modeled after a longstanding state law in Arizona that requires proof of citizenship to vote in state and local elections. During a panel hosted by Votebeat Wednesday, Arizona Secretary of State Adrian Fontes said online voter registration is “really important” to administering the requirement, especially when the system relies on state identification or drivers’ license data from other agencies.

In Arizona, election officials estimate that it costs 83 cents per registrant in staff time to enter data from a paper form; the staffing cost is only 3 cents when voters use the electronic voter registration application, according to Secure Democracy USA, a nonpartisan organization that advocates on election policy. That amount does not include the cost savings from less paper and postage.

At the hearing Thursday, Jennifer Doinoff, the Hays County elections administrator and a member of the Texas Association of County Election Officials, told lawmakers that the group supports the measure. The association is made up of Republican and Democratic elected officials and nonpartisan elections administrators across the state.

“The bill increases the accuracy of the voter records,” because voters put in the information directly, she said.

Lawmakers raised various concerns about the process, and election officials said other states have already addressed many issues. For example, state Rep. Carrie Isaac, a Republican from Central Texas, asked Doinoff how election officials would ensure that people aren’t trying to register multiple times. Doinoff responded that those risks aren’t limited to online voter registration, and election officials already have procedures in place to verify a voter’s identity and to check for duplicates.

State Rep. Valoree Swanson, a Republican from Harris County, said her main concern is the lack of a voter’s signature on an electronic form.

Bucy said the bill would require voters to have a state ID or driver’s license in order to register electronically, and counties would use those records to check for a signature.

Natalia Contreras covers election administration and voting access for Votebeat in partnership with the Texas Tribune. She is based in Corpus Christi. Contact Natalia at ncontreras@votebeat.org

Texas Legislature approves bill to ease polling place requirements for countywide voting

2025-05-13T20:59:27+00:00

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

What happened?

Both chambers of the Texas Legislature have passed a bill intended to roll back a 2023 law that required certain counties to drastically increase the number of polling locations — even in areas where buildings were scarce and funding wasn’t available to fully equip them.

The bill is now headed to the governor’s desk and set to become law.

Votebeat has reported that election officials in several counties said they were struggling to comply with the 2023 law as written.

What is the legislation called?

Senate Bill 985 is set to take effect in September.

Who supports the current legislation?

State Sen. Paul Bettencourt, a Houston Republican, championed the bill, and it was supported by the Texas Association of County Election Officials and the Texas Association of County and District Clerks.

“SB 985 is a commonsense correction to an unintended consequence from last session,

SB 924, which left counties scrambling to double polling locations and workers,”

Bettencourt said in a press release Tuesday. “This bill ensures smarter use of taxpayer dollars and better access for voters without sacrificing voter integrity whatsoever.”

How would it work?

The bill would modify a 2023 law that made it harder for counties using the countywide voting program — where voters can cast a ballot anywhere in their county on Election Day — to combine small voting precincts with few voters into larger ones.

The bill would effectively remove a late amendment to that law that ended up raising the minimum number of polling places that counties had to offer.

Why does it matter?

Before the change, counties using the countywide program had flexibility to combine polling sites to save money or make voting more convenient.

Counties have struggled to comply with the new requirements. For example, in Harris County, the state’s largest, the county clerk told party leaders that for the 2024 primary, she had to offer more than 100 more polling locations than in 2020 and 2022. Because of that, Republicans and Democrats had to run their primaries jointly and share voting equipment, because there wouldn’t have been enough for all the locations.

In other counties, election officials said they were not able to fully comply with the law. Brazos County Elections Administrator Trudy Hancock said the county did not have available funds to staff locations and purchase additional equipment. In his press release Tuesday, Bettencourt specifically pointed to Brazos as a county that would be helped by the legislation.

What are the arguments against the bill?

Some Democrats raised concerns that the bill would lead to fewer polling locations and reduced access to the ballot box. State Rep. John Bucy of Austin said during a hearing in March that the state should focus on providing more funding for elections to prevent further polling site closures.

What happens next?

The bill is headed to Gov. Greg Abbott’s desk for his signature. In Texas, however, a bill can become law without the governor’s signature.

Read more of Votebeat’s coverage of SB 924 and SB 985 here:

Natalia Contreras covers election administration and voting access for Votebeat in partnership with the Texas Tribune. She is based in Corpus Christi. Contact Natalia at ncontreras@votebeat.org

Pennsylvania Democrats pass sweeping election overhaul through the House, but skip GOP-priority voter ID

2025-05-13T20:20:07+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.

HARRISBURG — A sweeping bill to overhaul the commonwealth’s election laws has passed the Pennsylvania House. Its changes would include creating in-person early voting, giving counties more time to process mail ballots, and requiring counties to use mail ballot drop boxes.

But it doesn’t include one provision that will likely be important to its prospects: a voter ID requirement, something that Republicans, who control the state Senate, have always seen as crucial to any election law deal.

State House leaders in both parties have lately said they are open to a voter ID requirement after years of partisan fights. The chamber even advanced a standalone bill, sponsored by two swing-district lawmakers, that would create a lenient voter ID requirement for all in-person voters.

However, a top state House Democrat said that bill was pulled from this week’s voting calendar because some Republicans in the chamber weren’t going to vote for it. Given the limited House Democratic support, the proposal would have been short of the 102 votes needed for final passage.

In a statement, House Minority Leader Jesse Topper (R., Bedford) acknowledged that Republicans have “specific concerns with the details” of the voter ID proposal and said talks are ongoing. Spotlight PA and Votebeat previously reported that Republicans typically back stricter voter ID proposals than the one currently before the House.

State Rep. Tom Mehaffie (R., Dauphin), a co-sponsor of the voter ID proposal, told Spotlight PA and Votebeat that he feels “extremely confident this is exactly what voter ID should look like in Pennsylvania because it makes it constitutional.”

He said he hoped that lawmakers could pass the measure sometime when they return to session in June.

However, even if Mehaffie’s bill passes, the proposal would likely meet a frosty reception in the GOP-controlled state Senate.

In a statement, Kate Flessner, spokesperson for Senate Majority Leader Joe Pittman (R., Indiana), said that the upper chamber has “been consistent and clear that Voter ID should be implemented through the Constitutional Amendment process,” and not as simple legislation, as the House’s bill, if passed, would be.

“The legislation that is sent over from the House will be referred to the appropriate Senate standing committee for review,” Flesser concluded.

The broad election bill, without voter ID, passed the narrowly divided chamber 102 to 101, with no votes from Republicans.

Meanwhile, election officials on the ground are watching Harrisburg’s maneuvers closely, and county and local election officials told Votebeat and Spotlight PA they worry the House’s bill has contradictions that would make implementing some provisions difficult.

Long-sought changes on pre-canvassing and early voting

The House’s omnibus bill, sponsored by Speaker Joanna McClinton (D., Philadelphia), includes election law changes that Democrats have sought for years in an effort to improve voter access.

One of the most significant is the introduction of in-person early voting.

Currently, Pennsylvania allows a clunky process similar to early voting in which voters can request a mail ballot in person at their county elections office, fill it out, and cast it on site. Some counties also allow this to happen at satellite election offices. But the process has led to long lines and confused voters.

The bill would create a true early voting process, in which voters would be able to cast their vote ahead of time in the same manner they would on Election Day.

At least one early voting location would be required per county, with an additional location for every 100,000 voters. These locations would be open starting 11 days before the election and until the Sunday before Election Day.

McClinton’s bill also includes several process changes that county election officials have been advocating for since no-excuse mail voting was implemented in 2020.

It would allow counties to start preprocessing mail ballots up to seven days before Election Day. Currently, counties cannot begin to process them until the morning of Election Day.

County officials have repeatedly said that opening mail ballot envelopes and flattening the ballots — a process also known as pre-canvassing — is the most time-consuming part of tallying mail votes, and the inability to start the work before Election Day contributes to delayed results.

The measure also would remove the heavily litigated requirement that voters hand-write the date on the mail ballot return envelope, and would prohibit counties from rejecting mail ballots for being returned without an inner secrecy envelope.

If voters forget to sign the return envelope, counties would be required to notify them within 24 hours and provide them with a form, which could be filled out and returned up to six days after the election, to “cure” the error.

Lack of clarity on ballot curing in the state Election Code has led to a patchwork of policies across the state.

The bill would also require a minimum of two mail-ballot drop boxes in every county. It is currently up to individual counties to decide whether they will use drop boxes, and many don’t.

Counties would also be required to start using electronic poll books, which speed up voter check-in and post-voting checks, in all precincts by 2027.

The measure would authorize the Pennsylvania Economic Development Financing Authority to issue a $60 million bond that could specifically “fund reimbursement of counties for the purchase/lease of e-poll books and election infrastructure equipment,” according to the bill’s fiscal note.

It also directs the General Assembly to appropriate $2 million from the state’s general fund for the Department of State to assess and approve new electronic poll books for use in every county.

Some conflicting provisions cause confusion

The McClinton bill, however, appears to include some internal contradictions.

For instance, the measure allows counties to begin processing mail ballots before Election Day but prohibits workers from actually counting the votes during that period. However, that same restriction on tabulation isn’t in place for votes cast through early voting.

“I am not sure if the pre-canvassing thing is a mistake or not,” said Thad Hall, elections director in Mercer County. “Because if they really don’t want us to scan the ballots before Election Day, and we’re going to have early voting, it is contradictory.”

And while the bill eliminates the date requirement on mail ballots, the form that voters would use to cure other errors asks for them to provide a signature and date, raising questions about whether counties could still reject ballots for lacking a date on the form. That could set the state up for more litigation.

Beth Rementer, a state House spokesperson, said voters should provide a date on the cure form, but it is not required, and a missing or incorrect date would not be considered a defect that would disqualify a ballot.

As to the contradiction between pre-canvassing mail ballots and early-voting ballots, Rementer said tabulation is already not allowed before 8 p.m. election night.

Hall said that is incorrect, and that counties are already tabulating mail ballots before 8 p.m., just not reporting results. The law currently says pre-canvassing, which begins at 7 a.m. on Election Day, includes “the counting, computing and tallying of the votes.”

Hall said he appreciates that someone in legislative leadership is finally trying to address some of the issues facing local election officials, such as the long lines at elections offices due to the state’s lack of true early voting and the inefficiencies caused by the pre-canvassing prohibition.

But along with those possible contradictions, he said the bill is written in a way that doesn’t take into account things that affect medium or smaller counties.

Counties are currently required to locate their elections office in the county seat, and the bill would also require an early voting location in the county seat. Hall said this could be a problem for smaller counties, as their county seats often have limited office space.

Hall’s own county seat, the borough of Mercer, is home to fewer than 2,000 residents.

Delaware County Elections Director Jim Allen is skeptical the bill will pass the Senate in its current form, but said that as talks continue, he and other election officials are hoping the legislature will reach out to them for input.

“We can tell them what is going to be a pitfall, what is going to be problematic, and what items are totally impossible, such as the idea that there is equipment that does not count or tabulate,” he said, referring to the pre-canvassing language.

“I’m not aware of any election officials being consulted on this [legislation], that’s the conversation that has occurred [among us].”

Allen later highlighted some aspects of the bill he thinks are positive, including a requirement that those seeking a recount by claiming fraud or error provide evidence. He also praised provisions that criminalize interfering with drop box workers, and said the bill strikes a balance by allowing household members or caregivers, but not everyone, to return others’ mail ballots.

Bradford, the state House majority leader, told Votebeat and Spotlight PA that his chamber’s lawmakers recognize that “perfection is not what we do here.”

“But we need to move forward on these issues,” he said. “We look forward to having more discussions as the process continues on any issues [in the bill].”

Update, May 14: This story has been updated to include additional comments by Delaware County Elections Director Jim Allen.

Carter Walker is a reporter for Votebeat in partnership with Spotlight PA. Contact Carter at cwalker@votebeat.org. Stephen Caruso is the Capitol Reporter for Spotlight PA. Contact Stephen atscaruso@spotlightpa.org.

Texas bill would let election judges carry guns at polling places

2025-05-08T16:57:26+00:00

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

Texas House lawmakers debated gun rights and voter protections Wednesday afternoon related to a bill that would allow election judges to carry a weapon inside a polling place at any time.

House Bill 1128, by Rep. Carrie Isaac, R-Dripping Springs, would allow an election judge, early-voting clerk, or deputy early-voting clerk who is serving as an election judge to carry a concealed handgun at an early-voting or Election Day polling place as a means of protection for themselves and others. The bill passed 89 to 53 in the House and will now go to the Senate for approval.

This bill would codify a decision made by Attorney General Ken Paxton in 2018, where he ruled that since district judges can carry firearms to polling places, and election judges had been given the authority of district judges, they should also be able to do so.

Paxton’s opinion explains why a court would take his side in the decision, but it was not legally binding.

Election judges, who are generally civilians appointed by local party officials to head up a team of poll workers, have many duties, including settling election disputes and keeping the peace at the polls.

Isaac told lawmakers this bill was needed because the elections director for the Texas Secretary of State’s Office reported that during the 2024 election, workers endured bomb threats and physical attacks, including thrown water bottles. She said it’s becoming harder to retain and recruit poll workers because of this climate, so protections must be put in place at polling locations.

“Some workers even quit mid-election out of fear for their safety,” Isaac said from the House floor. “These are not isolated incidents. They are happening across Texas, and our workers are mostly volunteers giving their time to serve their communities. If we expect them to uphold the integrity of our elections, we must do our part.”

Critics of the bill questioned whether allowing an election judge to carry a weapon could be considered dangerous to the voting process.

“Do you really think arming someone with a firearm to combat someone with a water bottle is not escalating the situation?” Rep. Maria Luisa Flores, D-Austin, asked.

Rep. Barbara Gervin-Hawkins, D-San Antonio, asked why law enforcement couldn’t be at the polling locations to maintain order instead of expecting civilian election judges to carry a weapon and potentially have to fire on someone and disrupt the entire voting process.

“Unfortunately, it takes time for law enforcement to arrive, and that is why we need someone there at all times for protection,” Isaac responded. “...Your concern is about the election. My concern is about an innocent person getting hurt.”

Discussion about intimidation also occurred as Flores mentioned a case in Beaumont in 2022, where a federal judge issued an emergency order prohibiting Jefferson County election workers from scrutinizing the identities of Black voters and, along with poll watchers, from shadowing Black people at voting stations.

“I think this type of conduct, if combined with a gun, is detrimental,” said Rep. Vikki Goodwin, D-Austin. Rep. Jared Patterson, R-Frisco, said the bill isn’t malicious.

This bill would not change current laws banning the general public from bringing firearms to a polling location, and it would only allow election judges and those designated by them to carry guns, and not all poll workers, said Isaac.

Michigan Democrats’ election proposals sidestep the noncitizen-voting issue for now

2025-05-07T18:38:42+00:00

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

Michigan Democrats introduced their first pieces of legislation to respond to what they consider overly aggressive Republican proposals to improve election security.

As proposed, the package of bills under the Michigan Election Security Act won’t close the voter registration loopholes that may have allowed at least one noncitizen to cast a ballot that counted last year. And the bills omit the measures Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson suggested in February as a way to prevent noncitizens from casting ballots in Michigan’s elections.

In fact, the initial bills do little to directly address the threat of noncitizen voting, which Republicans have made a top priority since taking control of the House in January.

So what would these new bills do? And what comes next?

What is in the Michigan Election Security Act?

The Michigan Election Security Act, or MESA, is made up of three bills. They are the first of several in what will be a larger package of election proposals known as the Security, Accountability, and Nonintervention in Elections plan, or SANE, said Rep. Stephen Wooden, a Democrat from Grand Rapids.

“This first phase, in many ways, were the low-hanging fruit — things that have been discussed in the past, that didn’t make it through lame duck last session, that for one reason or another didn’t gain legs in previous terms but are worth revisiting,” Wooden told Votebeat on Tuesday.

The later phases will include bills more focused on noncitizen voting, he said, although what is in those bills will depend on the findings of Attorney General Dana Nessel’s investigation into 15 additional noncitizens who may have voted in 2024. (A spokesperson for Nessel confirmed that the investigations are ongoing but didn’t comment further Tuesday.)

The three MESA bills were written by the three Democrats on the House Election Integrity Committee, with additional sponsors including Rep. Penelope Tsernoglou, a Democrat from East Lansing who chaired the House Election Committee last session, when Democrats controlled the House, and more than 20 other Democrats.

The first, HB 4461 from Wooden, is the one that most directly addresses the threat of noncitizens registering and voting in Michigan.

Wooden’s bill would create new obligations for the secretary of state to help keep the voter rolls free of noncitizens. It would require the secretary to verify the citizenship of any registered voter who “during a transaction with the secretary of state” provides documentation suggesting they aren’t a citizen. The state would have to check the person against state vehicle databases or “any other relevant program.” If that person is found not to be a citizen, the secretary of state would have to notify that person that their voter registration will be canceled within 60 days unless they provide proof of citizenship.

The second bill, HB 4462, comes from Rep. Matt Koleszar of Plymouth. It would allow the secretary of state to remove someone from the voter rolls after they haven’t voted in 20 years. Benson has been working on a similar effort, but it is not a codified requirement.

HB 4463, from Rep. Mai Xiong of Warren, would require the secretary of state to review the instructions on voter registration forms every even-numbered year. The form would have to clearly state that U.S. citizenship is required to register.

Noncitizen voting has become a key target of legislative efforts in recent years, but it remains very rare. In Michigan, there are only 16 known cases of suspected noncitizens casting ballots during the 2024 general election, a tiny fraction of the more than 5.7 million votes cast across the state. The rate matches closely what audits in other states, including Ohio and Georgia, have found.

Republicans have argued that any incidence of noncitizen voting demands a response. In Michigan, they proposed House Joint Resolution B, a constitutional amendment that would require all newly registering voters to show documents proving their citizenship, and require those already registered to confirm their citizenship if the state can’t independently verify it.

Conservatives have hailed it as a commonsense approach to ensure that only citizens vote in U.S. elections, but Democrats and voting rights groups have warned that such a requirement could disenfranchise thousands of eligible voters, including those who don’t have easy access to citizenship documents.

HJR B failed to gain the two-thirds majority required for it to move out of the House last week, but it could come up for a vote again. Meanwhile, a group known as the Committee to Protect Voters’ Rights is pushing to get a nearly identical measure on the ballot next year through a petition drive.

The bills’ prospects in a divided Legislature

Wooden said future proposals from Democrats will aim to address the problem “at the root, rather than the large chainsaw approach like HJR B.”

But passing Democratic-led election bills in a Republican-controlled House won’t be easy. Wooden said he would welcome bipartisan support, but the MESA bills don’t have it yet.

He said he has “nothing but a cordial relationship” with Rep. Rachelle Smit, the Republican from Martin who leads the House Election Integrity Committee and oversees all elections-related bills. But even Tuesday morning, the two sparred during a committee hearing over how elections work in Michigan.

Smit’s office did not respond to a request for comment Tuesday.

Benson, whose office helped shape the bills, lauded the proposals in a news release as “important provisions that will strengthen our ability to keep our voter rolls up to date, help election officials more effectively identify and remove ineligible voter registrations, and provide additional tools to make sure eligible voters can easily register and cast their ballot.”

But Republicans don’t seem as confident that the bills will do enough to address concerns about election security. Rep. Bryan Posthumus, a Republican from Rockford and the main sponsor of HJR B, said he was glad Democrats were taking election security seriously but that he didn’t think the proposed bills went far enough.

He said Michigan needed “guardrails” to prevent noncitizens from being able to cast a ballot. He said he would be willing to work with Democrats on their legislative package.

“There are a million things that we can do to further secure our elections in a positive manner that doesn’t make it more difficult to vote,” he said. “I’m happy to have those conversations with whoever wants to have them, but that doesn’t change the fact that we need to require only U.S. citizens vote in our election with photo ID when casting a ballot.”

Hayley Harding is a reporter for Votebeat based in Michigan. Contact Hayley at hharding@votebeat.org.

Will Saturday’s elections be the last one in May for Texas?

2025-05-02T15:00:56+00:00

LUFKIN — Saturday could be the last municipal election Texas will ever hold in May.

And in Lovelady, a community of nearly 600 people in East Texas, they’ll end the evening with a shrimp boil at their polling place.

Cynthia Lum, the Houston County elections administrator overseeing Lovelady’s election this year, hopes the shrimp brings more folks to the polls.

“In their last election, which they ran themselves, they had two voters,” Lum said. “So we’ve tripled their votes so far.”

Participation in municipal elections, which largely happen the first Saturday in May, is notoriously low. That’s one reason why Texas lawmakers are considering ending them.

Senate Bill 1209, authored by Sen. Bryan Hughes, a Mineola Republican, would require most elections to be held in November and on Tuesdays. There are exceptions for the primaries, runoffs and special elections. That means city and school districts would be required to hold their elections in November, rather than May, as they are now.

Hughes said he hopes the change will save money and drive up voter turnout.

“Low turnout elections are closely and resource-intensive. And since each election has substantial fixed costs, the cost per ballot increases significantly when there’s low turnout,” Hughes told the State Affairs Committee.

“People don’t pay attention to local elections, and in May, they generally are local elections,” said Joyce LeBombard, president of the League of Women Voters in Texas. “Usually, governor elections and above get more attention than anything else, even though those local elections impact voters, generally much more than National elections.

The dropoff from a general fall election to ones held in May are staggering. In November 2022, about 44% of registered Dallas County voters participated in the election. The next May, just 9%.

Many small Texas cities, like Lovelady, will be lucky to see a dozen voters this weekend.

Lum says the legislation, which has already won approval from the state Senate and is waiting for a House committee to review it, would ease the strain on smaller counties and cities of holding multiple elections a year. And it has the potential to save taxpayers.

Elections cost a lot of money. Houston County estimated the Lovelady election might cost up to $15,000. That cost includes hiring election workers, voting machines and other supplies. Elections in the state’s largest counties could run into the millions. For example, the 2021 May election in Dallas County cost more than $3.1 million.

Moving the elections to November would instead allow more counties, cities and schools to split the cost, which could make a difference in small communities.

“Let’s say it costs $8,000 to run one precinct, that $8,000 could be divided by the school, the city and possibly the hospital district,” Lum said. “So instead of $8,000, you’re dividing it between four entities and talking about a couple thousand.”

While the change could save money, there are potential drawbacks.

Large counties worry the change would create a lengthy ballot, which, in turn, would mean longer waiting times for voters, said Jennifer Doinoff, who spoke during the State Affairs Committee hearing on behalf of large and small counties for the Texas Association of County Election Officials.

“Another concern is that some (counties) feel that moving all the jurisdictions of the May ballot would increase the number of December runoffs, resulting in very low turnout for those elections, and that those runoffs typically happen right during the holidays,” Doinoff said.

Small counties were typically in favor of the bill.

Many small counties, who have smaller staff, struggle to carry out multiple elections at one time and meet deadlines, Doinoff said.

Lum said there were many years in which she’d just finish everything needed for the March primaries when the May elections rolled around. And it became more hectic if a May runoff election was also needed.

There would be different complications. Lum said. School districts whose borders span two counties would have to work out where voters cast their ballots, and it may complicate the timeline for bond issues.

School districts will often seek bonds during the May elections with the goal of starting, and hopefully finishing, work by the start of school the following August, she said. Requiring a November election throws that out the window.

“Senate Bill 1209, removes local control and creates unnecessary financial and logistical burdens,” said Christopher Smith, the chief financial officer for Katy Independent School District, who spoke against this bill at the March 20 committee meeting.

Smith, who also spoke on behalf of the Fast Growth Schools Coalition, added moving school elections to November could cost school board candidates and supporters of bond elections more money to advertise amid national politics.

Common Cause Texas, a nonprofit voting advocacy group, opposes the bill. Emily French, the group’s policy director, said in an interview, she worries that prohibiting elections days on Saturdays could disenfranchise people who must work on a Tuesday.

LeBombard, the League of Women Voters leader, sees it differently and thinks turnout will increase.

“There will be more items in the election for voters to think about and for people to talk about,” LeBombard said. “So it will likely get more coverage than if it’s just a (municipal water district) having an election.”

Michigan proof-of-citizenship question fails to gain House support

2025-05-01T19:47:26+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.

An attempt to get a proof-of-citizenship requirement for would-be voters onto the 2026 ballot failed along party lines Thursday in the Michigan House — a blow to the GOP-backed effort, but likely not the final word.

The measure would require new Michigan voters — and almost certainly some current ones — to provide documents proving they are U.S. citizens before they can cast a ballot in the state. The measure’s sponsor, state Rep. Bryan Posthumus, a Republican from Rockford, said the resolution “is a common-sense way to close a massive loophole in our current system.”

The vote on House Joint Resolution B needed two-thirds approval, or at least 74 votes, to pass the House. Republicans control the state House, but only narrowly, and at least 16 Democrats would have needed to vote yes.

In the end, none did.

Democrats said the proposal would disenfranchise significant swaths of voters and make it harder to cast a ballot.

“We can always do more to make our elections more secure, and we should,” Rep. Penelope Tsernoglou, a Democrat from East Lansing, said during the debate Thursday. “But we don’t have to make it harder to vote to make our elections more secure.”

If the vote had succeeded, the measure would have gone next to the Democratic-controlled Michigan Senate, where it faced steep odds.

Still, the effort to get a proof-of-citizenship requirement before Michigan voters, part of a national push by Republicans across the country, isn’t dead yet. Republicans in the House voted to reconsider the vote another day, meaning that if Republicans can win enough bipartisan support, they still could get it through the House.

And there is another route. The Committee to Protect Voters’ Rights, a group that has challenged previous statewide efforts to expand voting rights, won approval of its petition language last month.

If the committee, working under the name “Prove It, Michigan,” is able to collect nearly 450,000 valid signatures from registered voters across the state, voters would then have to make a decision on the proposal. It’s not clear if the group is gathering signatures yet, but it only has until mid-October to do so.

Noncitizen voting is rare and already illegal. Federal law requires someone to attest that they are a citizen in order to register, but it stops short of requiring documentary proof. Republicans at the state and federal levels are supporting efforts to require such proof, including through the SAVE Act, federal legislation that has passed the U.S. House but faces long odds in the Senate.

HJR B sought to ask voters in the 2026 election whether they want the state to require new voters to prove their citizenship before registering. The measure as written would also require those already on the voter rolls to prove their citizenship if the state can’t independently verify it.

The proposal doesn’t spell out what documentation would be required to prove citizenship, instead requiring the state Legislature to work through those requirements if the proposal passes. It also has some provisions requiring the state to provide free documentation to those who need it due to hardship, but doesn’t specify how that will work.

In Michigan, conservatives have repeatedly raised concerns about noncitizen voting.Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson, a Democrat, announced last month that a state review found 15 new noncitizens who may have cast ballots during the 2024 general election. That number represents about 0.00028% of all ballots cast.

That’s in addition to the case of Haoxiang Gao, a 20-year-old University of Michigan student from China who has become the face of noncitizen voting in the state after registering and voting the same day. Gao is facing felony charges for that. As first reported by Votebeat, he now also faces a bench warrant and arrest after failing to show up for court last week.

Across the country, noncitizen voting is exceedingly unusual. A 2024 review in Ohio found fewer than 600 of the 8 million people registered in the state were not citizens. In that instance, 138 of those people had potentially voted in the last year, officials said. A similar 2024 review in Georgia found that 20 of the more than 8.2 million people registered to vote there aren’t U.S. citizens. Only nine of those 20 had voted in previous elections, state officials said.

Republicans have argued that any noncitizens casting a ballot serves to disenfranchise those who are casting ballots legally. Democrats and many voting rights groups argue that sweeping efforts to try to ensure only citizens are voting will disenfranchise many more voters by making it difficult for those who have changed their name, those who lack proper paperwork, and more.

Michigan is far from the only state considering a proof-of-citizenship requirement. Arizona has long enforced such a requirement for state and local elections, and New Hampshire, Wyoming, and Louisiana have more recently passed them. Texas has been moving along on Senate Bill 16, which is modeled after Arizona’s citizenship requirements. Other proposals have been considered in statehouses across the country, including Missouri, Indiana, Utah. and elsewhere, and many are still pending.

There’s also the federal push. Republicans have been rallying around the SAVE Act, which would introduce a proof-of-citizenship requirement at the national level. President Donald Trump in March issued an executive order that directed the U.S. Election Assistance Commission to require documented proof of citizenship from those registering to vote, but that was blocked by a federal judge last week.

On the floor of the Michigan House on Thursday, much of the debate followed party lines.

“I do agree with the sponsor on one particular issue: No one should be illegally voting in our elections. However, this legislation is not the answer,” Rep. Matt Koleszar, a Democrat from Plymouth, said Thursday.

At a February news conference, Democrats, led by Benson, promised to introduce legislation to fix potential loopholes that could allow noncitizen voting. They have not yet proposed a bill.

The final vote Thursday was 58-48 along party lines with a few Democrats absent.

Speaking after the vote, Posthumus told Votebeat he intends to make sure his proposal will be on the ballot, one way or another. Citing an October 2024 Gallup poll that found 83% of Americans said they favored proof-of-citizenship requirements, he criticized Democratic lawmakers for opposing it.

“I’ve had some Democrats in the past tell me that they were strongly considering supporting it. People have said they support it,” he said. “I think the Democrat party had to fall in line. Unfortunately for them, it just happens to be on the wrong side of the vast majority of the population.”

Hayley Harding is a reporter for Votebeat based in Michigan. Contact Hayley at hharding@votebeat.org.

Texas lawmakers hear concerns about bill to require proof of citizenship for voting

2025-04-25T17:19:23+00:00

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

Democratic lawmakers and Texas voters spent nearly four hours at a legislative hearing Thursday demanding to know how a GOP-backed bill to require citizenship proof from voters would work, and warning that it could disenfranchise eligible Texans.

Houston voter Jacqueline Altman told members of the House Election Committee that it recently took her two days to obtain a copy of her birth certificate from the county, a process that required her to miss work to sit in county offices.

“When decisions are being made about these kinds of documentation, I ask that we take all of that into consideration.” said Altman, one of around a dozen Texans who testified in opposition to the bill.

House Bill 5337 goes further than the laws and proposals in some other states, in that it would apply retroactively to already-registered voters in Texas, not just new applicants. Texas has more than 18 million registered voters.

Officials with the Texas Secretary of State’s Office told lawmakers Thursday that they estimate around 500,000 currently registered voters who don’t have a driver’s license number or Social Security number in their voter registration record would have to provide proof of citizenship.

That group could include many people who registered before the early 2000s, when federal voting laws began requiring people obtaining state-issued IDs or driver’s licenses to provide proof of citizenship or lawful presence in the U.S. Election officials said many are likely elderly.

How big a problem is noncitizen voting in Texas?

HB 5337 is identical to Senate Bill 16, which passed the state Senate along party lines and with little debate earlier this month. The House version of the legislation is co-sponsored by 50 Republican lawmakers.

The legislation is modeled after an Arizona law that requires proof of citizenship to vote in state and local elections. The Texas legislation would also bar voters who don’t provide citizenship proof from voting in presidential elections; a similar restriction in Arizona has so far been blocked by federal courts.

The Texas bills would also require local election officials to continually check the citizenship status of voters on their rolls — and subject the officials to potential felony charges if they lapse. In Arizona, a state error tracking proof of citizenship recently left election officials struggling to consistently administer the requirement.

Republican lawmakers in Texas have for months been responding to a nationwide GOP campaign to raise alarm about the threat of noncitizen voting, even though available evidence shows it is extremely rare.

In December, the Texas Secretary of State told the Legislature that in 2024, election officials cancelled 63 registrations for noncitizenship and 124 for failing to respond to a notice requesting proof of citizenship. Voters who failed to respond to a notice could still be citizens.

During Thursday’s Elections Committee hearing, state Rep. Carrie Isaac, a Dripping Springs Republican leading the push for the House version of the legislation, said the goal is to prevent all noncitizens from registering to vote.

Isaac cited an announcement by Gov. Greg Abbott last fall that 6,500 noncitizens had been removed from Texas voter rolls prior to 2024. An investigation by Votebeat, Texas Tribune and ProPublica found Abbott’s numbers were inflated and, in some instances, wrong.

In a span of three years, the state actually removed 581 people as noncitizens. The remaining 6,000 or so were people who had failed to respond to a notice asking to confirm their citizenship, which doesn’t mean they weren’t citizens. The investigation indeed found that some eligible citizens had been flagged as potential noncitizens and removed from the rolls.

State Rep. John Bucy, a Democrat from Austin and vice chair of the Elections Committee, described the data Isaac cited as “misleading” and pointed out that election officials already check the rolls for potential noncitizens.

“The system we have is working,” Bucy told Isaac. “We’re catching people. We’re cleaning the rolls, and they’re not voting.”

Isaac said the number of documented cases of noncitizens voting “may seem small” but said there was no reliable way to measure the scope of it “because the current system doesn’t require documentation of citizenship.”

The bill would cost state officials nearly $2 million over the next five years to implement, according to the bill’s fiscal note. That number doesn’t include the costs for local election officials.

Some Texans don’t have access to citizenship documents

Research suggests that lack of accessible citizenship documentation could be a more widespread issue than noncitizen voting.

In Texas, Republicans are more likely than Democrats to lack documented proof of citizenship, a 2024 study by the Center for Democracy and Civic Engagement at the University of Maryland found. One percent of Republicans do not have it, the researchers found, and 7% cannot easily access their documents, while nearly all Texas Democrats have documented proof, and 4% cannot easily access it.

The study also found that younger Texans are three times more likely to have trouble accessing their documented proof of citizenship than older Texans.

Under the legislation, voters could fulfill the requirement by providing any of the following:

a copy of a U.S. passport;
a passport card;
a certified copy of a birth certificate issued by a U.S. state or territory;
“United States citizenship papers”;
identification issued by the U.S. agency responsible for citizenship and immigration; or
for citizens born outside the U.S., a consular report of birth abroad.

Anyone who shows up to the polls who has yet to provide proof of citizenship will have six days to provide it in order for their full ballot to count. If a voter does not provide it, only the votes in congressional races will be counted.

The list of accepted documents does not include tribal documents, which Arizona does accept. Cecilia Flores, the tribal council chairwoman for the Alabama-Coushatta Tribe of Texas, which is located in East Texas, asked lawmakers Thursday to include tribal documents in that list. In Arizona, a Votebeat analysis found voters living on tribal land were more likely to wind up on the federal-only voter list, signaling they may struggle to provide citizenship proof.

“While many of our tribal citizens may possess a proper birth certificate, my mother was born in 1928 and I have never seen her birth certificate,” Flores said.

Bucy asked Isaac and other Republicans on the committee to consider amendments to the bill that would expand the type of acceptable IDs and documents.

The House bill was left pending Thursday. The House and Senate must both pass the same version of the legislation, which would then go to Abbott for his signature.

Natalia Contreras covers election administration and voting access for Votebeat in partnership with the Texas Tribune. She is based in Corpus Christi. Contact Natalia at ncontreras@votebeat.org.

Counties would be banned from mailing out unsolicited voter registration forms under Texas bills

2025-04-25T12:48:52+00:00

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

Before the 2024 election, two Texas counties mailed out voter registration forms to hundreds of thousands of residents, unsolicited. Only a small share were returned, but the move sparked a backlash from some Republican lawmakers who said the mailings could make it easier for ineligible people to register and cast ballots.

Now, bills moving through the Texas Legislature would bar counties from sending out voter registration forms to people who didn’t request them. It would also bar the state from using public money to support such mailings by other groups.

State Sen. Paul Bettencourt, a Houston Republican who sponsored Senate Bill 511, said it would put voter-registration applications under the same restrictions that are already in place for mail-ballot applications. A 2021 Texas law — which faces challenges in federal court — barred election officials from sending out unsolicited mail-ballot applications. State Rep. Tom Oliverson, a Houston-area Republican, filed a bill identical to SB 511 in the House. Both bills have been advanced and could soon reach the floors of their respective chambers.

“The government shouldn’t be putting their thumb on the scale by doing this without a solicitation from the voter,” Bettencourt said, adding that the effort is a “horrible waste of taxpayer money.”

Voting rights groups said the bills could also make it harder to get registration forms in other ways.

In all, three large Texas counties, all Democratic strongholds, moved last year to mail out voter registration applications to residents who were eligible but not yet registered, ahead of the presidential election. In Harris County, the effort quickly stalled following criticism from Bettencourt. Travis and Bexar moved forward, and ran into challenges from Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, who sued to stop the effort. In Bexar County, Paxton’s lawsuit was dismissed. In Travis County, Democratic officials sued Paxton and the state over the attempt, and that case is still moving through the courts.

Bexar County spent $261,000 on the mailing and got back about 15,000 registrations out of them, or 11% of the 136,349 voter registration forms that were mailed out, according to county officials.

That’s well short of the initial goal of 75,000 that county officials discussed. But Bexar County Commissioner Justin Rodriguez, who championed the program, said he would support such an effort again. He said the cost isn’t a waste of taxpayer dollars but instead “an investment in democracy and community outreach.”

“Of those 15,000 newly registered, I think almost 85% of those actually participated. And so to me, it was successful in that regard,” Rodriguez told Votebeat. “You got more people engaged in the process. And that was the goal from the outset.”

Travis County officials declined to comment citing pending litigation.

Bettencourt said the bill does not prevent deputy volunteer voter registrars and candidates from distributing voter registration applications. But some voting rights advocates say language in the bill that says state officials “may not distribute a form on which a person may apply for registration to a person who didn’t request it” is too broad. They say it could have implications for election officials who, for instance, choose to display voter registration application forms on the counter of their elections offices.

“If you are in a voter registration office, you have to say a set of magic words in order to get a voter registration application. You have to specifically request it,” said Emily Eby French, policy director for Common Cause Texas.

If either bill clears both the House and Senate, the proposal will head to Gov. Greg Abbott’s desk.

Natalia Contreras covers election administration and voting access for Votebeat in partnership with the Texas Tribune. She is based in Corpus Christi. Contact Natalia at ncontreras@votebeat.org

Bill requiring voters to show proof of citizenship clears Texas Senate

2025-04-01T22:49:15+00:00

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

In a quick vote after little debate, the Texas Senate approved a bill that would require voters to provide proof of citizenship before registering, and would restrict them to voting in congressional races only if they do not.

The bill, a Republican legislative priority, still needs approval in the state House before it can become law. It would cost state officials nearly $2 million over the next five years to implement, according to the bill’s fiscal note, which doesn’t include any costs expected to be borne by local election officials.

Senate Bill 16, written by state Sen. Bryan Hughes, and supported by all Senate Republicans, is modeled after an Arizona law that requires proof of citizenship to vote in state and local elections, but there are some important differences.

For one thing, it would apply to already registered voters in Texas, rather than just new applicants. It would bar voters who don’t provide citizenship proof from voting in presidential elections, as well as state and local ones — a provision that federal courts have so far blocked in Arizona. And it prescribes new duties for local election officials to continually check the citizenship status of voters on their rolls — with potential felony charges for lapses.

The Republican lawmakers are responding to a nationwide GOP campaign to raise alarm about the threat of noncitizen voting, even though it doesn’t occur in significant numbers.

“Most Texans have already proven their citizenship when they got their driver’s license, but the feds have not allowed us to do this for voter registration. Senate Bill 16 will address that,” Hughes said Tuesday during a Senate floor debate on the bill. Hughes said the process for voters would be “seamless.”

But voting rights advocates say the bill could create a new barrier to voting for Texas’ more than 18 million registered voters, and could diminish the rights of eligible voters who are not able to provide documents proving their U.S. citizenship.

“This is going to upend the way we do elections here in Texas,” Elisabeth MacNamara, advocacy chair for the League of Women Voters of Texas, told Votebeat. “This is a huge burden on voters. It’s also a huge burden on election administrators, and we already don’t over-resource our elections so this is going to make things a whole lot worse.”

If approved by the Legislature, the new law would go into effect in September. Some election officials are concerned that the bill’s requirements will confuse voters.

“It’s not enough time to get everyone familiar with the requirements. We have a primary in March” of 2026, said Jennifer Doinoff, president of the Texas Association of County Election Officials. “It could create a huge influx in provisional ballots.”

Doinoff said election officials across the state are still trying to understand how the bill will be implemented. Among unanswered questions is how the process will work for Texans who vote by mail. In Texas, only elderly voters, people with disabilities, and those who are away from their county on Election Day, including members of the military, can cast ballots by mail. The bill doesn’t address that, she said.

In addition, election officials are asking legislators to consider including a backup option, such as an affidavit voters can sign if they can’t provide proof of citizenship. “We use something similar to that at the polls for voters who can’t provide an ID,” she said.

What the state would need to do to implement the change

If passed, the sweeping bill will require much work and additional resources. It directs the Texas Secretary of State’s Office to, by the end of the year, send all counties lists of already-registered voters who had not provided proof of citizenship prior to September 2025. Election officials would then have to document every effort made to check for such proof.

If they can’t verify that a voter is a U.S. citizen, they would have to notify the person that they are permitted to vote only a “federal limited ballot” unless they can provide proof. A voter who has provided proof before or has been verified as a U.S. citizen wouldn’t have to provide proof when updating or changing their registration information.

According to the bill’s fiscal note, the Texas Secretary of State’s Office would need a modification to the state’s voter registration management system in order to record whether a person has submitted evidence of citizenship, since the system currently isn’t set up to do so.

The state has estimated the cost of that at $578,931 in 2026 and $84,000 per fiscal year thereafter, the fiscal note says.

In addition, the Secretary of State’s Office said it would need two additional staff members to conduct citizenship verification reviews and to coordinate with county voter registrars. The two positions would be paid $70,662 per year, and benefits and other costs for both positions would cost around $45,000 per year. The agency also estimates that the positions would require roughly $16,000 in setup costs in 2026.

The agency declined to comment.

Opponents question why the bill is needed

Last month, during a two-hour public hearing on the bill, more than 200 people signed up to oppose it, and many testified against it. Twenty-six people supported it, including people from across the state who identified as Republicans.

Some Senate Democrats Tuesday pressed Hughes on why the bill was necessary and warned that it would set up the state for legal battles, much as it has in Arizona. Hughes denied that would happen.

In arguing that the bill isn’t necessary, Sen. Carol Alvarado, a Houston Democrat, cited the findings of an investigation by Votebeat, ProPublica, and the Texas Tribune that showed an announcement from Gov. Greg Abbott about noncitizens removed from the state’s voter rolls inflated, and in some cases misstated, the numbers.

Alvarado also said the bill could become cumbersome for local election officials and lead to voter confusion.

Hughes said there would be “plenty of time” to prepare ahead of next year’s elections, and said he believes many Texans have already shown proof of citizenship while obtaining a driver’s license. Election officials will be able to verify others, he said. “So we’re talking about a relatively small group of people,” Hughes said.

Which documents would be accepted as citizenship proof?

Under the legislation, voters could prove their citizenship by providing any of the following:

a copy of a U.S. passport;
a passport card;
a certified copy of a birth certificate issued by a U.S. state or territory;
“United States citizenship papers”;
identification issued by the U.S. agency responsible for citizenship and immigration; or
for citizens born outside the U.S., a consular report of birth abroad.

The list does not include tribal documents, which Arizona does accept. Anyone who shows up to the polls who has yet to provide proof of citizenship will have six days to provide it in order for their full ballot to count. If a voter does not provide it, only the federal races will be counted.

A big part of the bill is new duties and burdens for election officials and others who manage voter registration. Deputy registrars — volunteers who work at voter registration drives — would have to notify people registering to vote that they must present documented proof of citizenship to their local county registrar. In addition to checking for proof themselves, and documenting their efforts, local election officials would have to report the names of voters who have not provided proof to the state attorney general. And they would be subject to potential criminal penalties, including jail time, for knowingly registering an applicant without first verifying that they are citizens.

The provision requiring already registered voters to prove their citizenship could affect voters who registered prior to the 2002 Help America Vote Act, which created voter identification procedures, and the 2005 Real ID Act, which requires people obtaining a state-issued ID or driver’s license to provide proof of citizenship or proof of lawful presence in the U.S.

Natalia Contreras covers election administration and voting access for Votebeat in partnership with the Texas Tribune. She is based in Corpus Christi. Contact Natalia at ncontreras@votebeat.org

Skeptics of new Arizona ballot security bill zero in on sponsor’s links to key vendor

2025-02-20T19:30:02+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.

Arizona Republican lawmakers are again proposing to require security features on the state’s ballot paper, but Democratic skeptics are responding by pointing to a potential conflict of interest involving the proposal’s leading advocate.

State Sen. Mark Finchem’s bill, SB1123, would require the state to use ballot paper with specific security features — such as a hologram, barcode and watermark — that he says would ensure only “legitimate” ballots are cast in the state’s elections.

Finchem, a Republican, attempted to get the requirements into law a few years ago, and they were written into the rules for a pilot program that the state approved funding for in 2022. But that pilot program was scrapped, amid concerns about the potential conflicts involved.

A Votebeat investigation published after the state approved the pilot found that the requirements were written in such a way that there appeared to be only one qualified vendor: Authentix, a company that had ties to Finchem through a nonprofit group he once ran.

The requirements were written by Cochise County Recorder David Stevens, a friend of Finchem’s and the only official who applied to run the pilot program for the state. After the Votebeat report was published in August 2023, the Cochise County supervisors voted to scrap a proposed contract with Authentix.

Finchem’s new bill lists 10 specific security features — the same ones as in the requirements Stevens developed, except for a few wording changes — and would require Arizona ballots to use at least three of them.

The bill’s detailed description of the products closely matches what Authentix, an international anticounterfeiting-technology company, has advertised that it could provide. But the list includes many features that aren’t used in the U.S., and may not even be suited for U.S. elections. “Secure holographic foil,” for example, may be reflective, which could make ballots unreadable by ballot tabulators.

Runbeck Election Services, a ballot vendor based in Phoenix, told Votebeat it provides features similar to four of the 10 features listed in the bill.

When Finchem explained his bill on Jan. 29 to the Committee on Judiciary and Elections, Democratic state Sen. Lauren Kuby, cited the Votebeat article — quoting it directly in the hearing room — and asked Finchem whether his proposal represented a conflict of interest, because an Authentix co-founder had been listed as a team member of his energy nonprofit.

“Authentix has ties to you, correct, and it might be the only vendor that can supply this paper?” she said.

Finchem responded by calling the claim a “red herring.”

“While I know the people that may have been involved in that, there is no financial interest,” he said. “It’s merely a business acquaintance.”

Finchem also told Kuby and the committee that other companies besides Authentix could meet the requirements of his bill. He did not return a phone call from Votebeat asking which companies could, or comment further on the potential conflict.

Unlike the proposed pilot program, Finchem’s bill calls for requiring only three of the 10 features listed in the bill, so it’s possible that Runbeck’s offerings could also meet the requirements.

The committee voted along party lines to move the bill forward. But even if it passes the Republican-led Legislature, it’s unlikely that Gov. Katie Hobbs will sign it unless some Democratic lawmakers sign on.

Finchem has long claimed without evidence that fake ballots were inserted into the 2020 election. His claims ignore the fact that Arizona counties have multiple checks and balances to ensure that doesn’t happen. That includes 24/7 camera surveillance, with livestreams, of areas where ballots are handled, along with bipartisan teams of workers, and auditing protocols, such as those that reconcile the number of ballots cast with the number of voters who participated.

After Cochise County rejected the Authentix pilot, Runbeck helped the county test the security features it could offer, including invisible fibers, a watermark, an infrared taggant, and UV dead paper. The county’s tabulation machines were able to properly tabulate ballot paper with these features, Stevens, the county recorder, wrote in a Feb. 3 report on the test. The additional cost to include these features, he wrote, would be between 10 and 15 cents a ballot.

By comparison, Authentix had estimated that incorporating all of its features would cost $2.75 a ballot. With about 4 million ballots cast in the state, that would be a $10 million cost increase just for the ballots, Kuby, the Democratic senator, said.

She said if the proposal was just for something like requiring a watermark, like California has on its ballots, and it was cost-effective and followed best practices, she may consider supporting it. But, she said, “as constituted now, there are lots of red flags in the proposed bill.”

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

Defensores del voto en todo el condado en Texas luchan contra los intentos de eliminarlo

2025-02-05T17:23:07+00:00

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Más de una docena de condados en Texas están enfrentando el intento de algunos legisladores republicanos estatales de eliminar un programa que permite a los votantes emitir su voto en cualquier centro de votación del condado el día de las elecciones. Argumentan que esta opción ahorra millones de dólares a los contribuyentes y facilita el proceso de votación.

Funcionarios del condado afirman que los líderes locales y las autoridades electorales, que comprenden mejor las necesidades de sus comunidades, deberían ser quienes decidan si se permite la votación en todo el condado el día de las elecciones.

Se presentaron dos propuestas legislativas para eliminar esta opción, actualmente vigente en 99 condados y que beneficia a más del 80% del electorado estatal. De aprobarse su eliminación, los condados probablemente tendrían que habilitar un mayor número de centros de votación en distintas comunidades, además de dotarlos con el equipo y el personal necesario, dado que los votantes solo podrían sufragar en su recinto asignado. En algunos condados, la disponibilidad de instalaciones adecuadas es limitada.

“Queremos que [los legisladores] entiendan que esto representará un gran gasto para los condados pequeños,” expresó Kirk Frye, comisionado del condado de Parmer. Parmer está ubicado en la frontera con Nuevo México y muchos de sus 9,800 habitantes viajan largas distancias diariamente a Amarillo o a Nuevo México, lo que les dificulta votar cerca de su hogar el día de la elección. “Tener centros de votación en todo el condado es simplemente más conveniente para nuestra gente,” añadió.

El senador estatal Bob Hall, republicano del norte de Texas, ha impulsado varias veces proyectos de ley para eliminar la votación en todo el condado. Según él, este programa carece de transparencia, produce cifras inexactas y genera resultados que no pueden ser conciliados. Además, ha presentado una iniciativa para prohibir el uso de equipo de votación electrónica necesario para su implementación. En la Cámara de Representantes, el legislador estatal Steve Toth, republicano del Este de Texas, ha propuesto medidas similares.

Autoridades estatales y locales han cuestionado las declaraciones de Hall respecto a la transparencia y los resultados. También han señalado las numerosas ventajas de los modelos de “centros de votación”, como el sistema de votación en todo el condado de Texas.

El programa ayuda a los condados, sobre todo a los rurales, a administrar mejor sus recursos, ya que pueden reducir la cantidad de centros de votación y ubicarlos en puntos más accesibles. También ofrece mayor flexibilidad en caso de que un centro cierre — por un corte de energía o un desastre natural, por ejemplo — permitiendo a los votantes acudir a cualquier otra ubicación disponible.

Funcionarios electorales en distintos condados aseguran que eliminar la votación a nivel condado tendría consecuencias costosas para sus comunidades. En Kaufman, ubicado en el distrito de Hall, la propuesta significaría un gasto adicional de más de un millón de dólares, según la administradora electoral del condado, Tandi Smith. Y eso únicamente en el equipo de votación. También habría costos recurrentes, como el pago por hora a los trabajadores electorales, la compra de suministros, el alquiler de locales y otros gastos.

Es por eso que, en diciembre, los comisionados del condado de Kaufman aprobaron de manera unánime una resolución en contra de eliminar el programa y el equipo electrónico necesario para su funcionamiento. Más de una docena de condados han hecho lo mismo, entre ellos Hays, en el centro de Texas; Gregg y Austin, en el Este del estado; y Parmer. Otros doce condados están en proceso de redactar resoluciones similares. Del mismo modo, funcionarios electorales de algunos condados en expansión que no participan en el programa manifestaron a Votebeat su interés en preservar la facultad de decidir, a nivel local, si implementarlo o no.

Frye, comisionado del condado de Parmer y vicepresidente de la Asociación de Jueces y Comisionados de Condados de Texas, señaló que la organización aprobó una resolución propia en octubre en contra de la eliminación del programa. La medida también busca obtener más fondos estatales para las elecciones locales.

Hall no contestó las solicitudes de Votebeat para dar declaraciones ni respondió a preguntas sobre su disposición a considerar propuestas de financiamiento para los cambios. Toth tampoco emitió comentarios al respecto.

Modelo de centros de votación: una solución para que los condados cumplan con la ley electoral federal

El modelo de centros de votación fue creado en 2003 por un funcionario electoral del condado de Larimer, en Colorado, con el propósito de cumplir con los requisitos de accesibilidad establecidos en la Ley Ayuda a América a Votar de 2002. Esta legislación federal asignó fondos para modernizar la tecnología electoral y mejorar el acceso al voto tras los problemas detectados en las elecciones presidenciales del 2000. Sin embargo, cumplir con estos requisitos implicaba altos costos, y algunos condados habrían necesitado instalar equipos de votación adicionales en cientos de ubicaciones. El modelo de centros de votación permitió reducir la cantidad de ubicaciones necesarias, ya que los votantes podían emitir su voto en cualquier centro habilitado.

Texas implementó esta opción en 2006, después de que un representante estatal republicano impulsara un proyecto de ley para crear un programa piloto. La medida obtuvo respaldo bipartidista y exigía que los condados participantes contaran con libros electrónicos de votación y otros sistemas de gestión del registro electoral para garantizar que cada votante emitiera un solo sufragio. En su informe más reciente a la Legislatura, la Oficina del Secretario de Estado de Texas declaró que el programa ha sido un éxito y destacó que brinda “una oportunidad adicional para que los votantes que planean participar en la elección puedan hacerlo, de manera similar a la votación anticipada”.

El programa es utilizado por condados en todas las regiones del estado, cubriendo en total a unos 14.9 millones de votantes, lo que equivale al 83% del electorado registrado en Texas, según la Oficina del Secretario de Estado del estado.

El condado de Austin, en el Este de Texas, es una comunidad rural donde muchos de sus más de 30,000 habitantes se desplazan diariamente hacia Houston, al este, o Brenham, al norte, para trabajar. Otros residentes también viajan a diario hacia el oeste y el sur del condado. La implementación del modelo de votación a nivel condado el día de las elecciones ha permitido a las autoridades electorales ubicar centros de votación estratégicamente en casi todos los rincones del condado, a disposición de cualquier residente. Por ejemplo, un votante que reside en Sealy, en el sur del condado, y trabaja en Houston, puede acceder a un centro de votación ubicado en un salón comunitario a lo largo del corredor de la I-10, tanto en su trayecto de ida como de regreso. Asimismo, un votante de Bellville, la cabecera del condado, que se traslada una hora al oeste hasta LaGrange, también puede encontrar un centro de votación en su ruta.

Un legislador se opone al programa

Los críticos más fervientes del programa, defensores del conteo manual de boletas, han sostenido durante años que los equipos de votación electrónica pueden ser manipulados por las autoridades electorales. En 2023, Hall fue uno de los principales oradores en una iniciativa organizada para eliminar el uso de equipos electrónicos y reemplazarlos con el conteo manual de boletas. Sin embargo, expertos advierten que es un método más costoso y propenso a errores e imprecisiones en el conteo de votos.

Ese año, durante la sesión legislativa, Hall presentó por primera vez un proyecto de ley para eliminar el programa de centros de votación. Aunque fue aprobado en el Senado, no logró avanzar en la Cámara de Representantes. Este año, Hall forma parte del Comité de Asuntos Estatales del Senado, el cual se encarga de evaluar propuestas relacionadas con elecciones y votación. Daniel Griffith, director senior de políticas en la Fundación por la Democracia Segura, aseguró que es muy probable que el proyecto de Hall vuelva a tener una audiencia en el comité. No obstante, el respaldo que el programa tiene entre los votantes y las autoridades del condado podría reducir sus posibilidades de aprobación en la Cámara de Representantes.

Recientemente, los críticos del programa han intentado vincular el problema de confidencialidad en las boletas de Texas con el uso de este sistema. Sin embargo, tanto las autoridades estatales como los funcionarios electorales locales afirman que no hay relación entre ambos. Explican que la causa real es la política de Texas de hacer públicos la mayoría de los registros electorales, lo que en algunos casos permite cruzar documentos y acceder a la imagen de una boleta específica. Aun sin el programa, seguiría siendo posible en ciertas circunstancias.

Hall ha declarado públicamente que el programa ha generado “inconsistencias inexplicables” en el total de los votos y que impide auditar los resultados por distrito electoral. Sin embargo, las autoridades electorales aseguran que está equivocado, ya que la ley actual les exige conciliar los totales y les permite generar informes con los resultados por distrito.

Este año, Hall impulsó un proyecto de ley para eliminar los libros de registro electrónicos, de uso obligatorio en los condados que ofrecen votación en todo su territorio, junto con las máquinas de votación utilizadas en la mayoría de los condados. También ha manifestado su apoyo a la eliminación de la votación anticipada y a restringir el voto exclusivamente en persona y dentro del precinto electoral asignado.

Aumentarán los costos de equipos, personal y otros recursos

Jennifer Briggs, administradora electoral del condado de Gregg, que cuenta con casi 80,000 votantes registrados, señaló que si el estado decide eliminar el equipo de votación que actualmente permite al condado participar en el programa, se desperdiciarían más de un millón de dólares provenientes de los contribuyentes. Además, advirtió que esta medida podría generar un impacto económico significativo en la comunidad.

Asimismo, almacenar libros de registro y boletas de papel requeriría más espacio, además de un sistema sofisticado de control climático, algo con lo que el condado no cuenta en este momento.

Según Briggs, el condado podría enfrentar un costo adicional de $800,000, para cubrir la compra de nuevos equipos y materiales, el pago de salarios a los trabajadores electorales, la apertura de más centros de votación y otros gastos.

En varios condados, los administradores electorales ya tienen dificultades para cumplir con la legislación aprobada en 2023, que les obliga a aumentar el número de centros de votación y extender los horarios y días de votación anticipada. Algunos han encontrado obstáculos para ubicar edificios públicos que cumplan con los requisitos de accesibilidad.

En ciertas zonas, donde el presupuesto no alcanza para cubrir las horas adicionales exigidas, las autoridades han tenido que cerrar centros de votación anticipada, limitando así el acceso de los votantes. La eliminación del programa solo aumentaría esa carga.

Kim Rinn, recaudadora de impuestos y funcionaria electoral en el condado de Austin, advirtió que regresar al sistema de votación por precinto podría incrementar el número de boletas provisionales. Su preocupación es que, al tener que acudir a un sitio de votación específico, algunos votantes podrían confundirse y terminar en el lugar incorrecto.

“Esas boletas no serán válidas,” señaló Rinn, pues se rechazan si no se emiten en el sitio de votación correcto. El condado de Austin se unió al programa en 2022, y según Rinn, los votantes ya están familiarizados con él. Además, ha contribuido a que las elecciones locales sean más eficientes y a minimizar la confusión entre los votantes.

Agregó que eliminar el programa también podría afectar los presupuestos de los distritos escolares y las ciudades del condado, ya que ellos organizan sus propias elecciones. Según Rinn, si el programa desaparece, también tendrían que aumentar la cantidad de trabajadores, equipos y centros de votación.

“Me gustaría que los legisladores consideraran a todos y no solo a quienes viven en sus distritos,” expresó Rinn. “Cada condado tiene sus propias razones para actuar como lo hace.”

Natalia Contreras es reportera de Votebeat en colaboración con el Texas Tribune. Para comunicarte con Natalia, envíale un mensaje a ncontreras@votebeat.org.

Texas supporters of countywide voting on election day fight efforts to end it

2025-02-03T10:50:00+00:00

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

More than a dozen Texas counties are fighting a push by some Republican state lawmakers to get rid of a program that allows voters to cast their ballots at any county polling location on election day, arguing that the option saves taxpayers millions of dollars and makes voting more convenient.

County officials say it should be up to local leaders and election officials who best understand the needs of their communities to decide whether to offer countywide voting on election day.

Two bills have been filed to get rid of the option, which is allowed in 99 counties encompassing more than 80% of the state’s voters. Eliminating it would mean counties would almost certainly have to open, equip, and staff more neighborhood voting sites, since election day voters would be able to vote only at their assigned precinct. In some counties, available facilities are also difficult to find.

“We want [the lawmakers] to know this is going to cost small counties a lot of money,” said Kirk Frye, a Parmer County commissioner. Parmer County is on the New Mexico border, and many of its 9,800 residents have long commutes to Amarillo or to New Mexico, which makes it harder for them to vote near their home on election day. “Countywide polling places are just convenient for our people,” he said.

State Sen. Bob Hall, a Republican from North Texas who has repeatedly filed legislation to eliminate countywide voting, says the program lacks transparency, and produces inaccurate vote totals and results that can’t be reconciled. He has also filed a bill that would eliminate the use of the electronic voting equipment necessary to participate in the program. State Rep. Steve Toth, a Republican from East Texas, has also filed similar proposals in the House.

State and local officials have disputed Hall’s assertions about transparency and results, and pointed to the myriad benefits of “vote center” models like Texas’ countywide voting program.

The program allows counties, especially those in rural areas, to expend fewer resources by staffing and equipping fewer polling locations in areas more accessible to voters. If a polling location shuts down — due to loss of power or a natural disaster, for example — voters aren’t limited and can still cast a ballot at any other available location.

Election officials in multiple counties say getting rid of countywide voting would have costly effects on their communities. In Kaufman County, located in Hall’s district, the bill would result in new costs totaling more than $1 million, said the county’s election administrator, Tandi Smith. And that’s just for the additional voting equipment. There would also be ongoing expenses for election workers’ hourly wages, supplies, and facility rental fees, and other things.

That’s why Kaufman County commissioners in December unanimously passed a resolution in opposition to eliminating the program and the electronic equipment needed to implement it. More than a dozen counties have followed, including Hays in Central Texas, Gregg and Austin counties in East Texas, and Parmer County. A dozen more counties are drafting similar resolutions. In addition, election officials in growing counties that are not part of the program told Votebeat they’d like to keep the option of whether or not to use it at the local level.

Frye, the Parmer County commissioner, who is also the vice president of the Texas Association of County Judges and Commissioners, said the organization passed its own resolution opposing the elimination of the program last October. The resolution also seeks more state funds for local elections.

Hall did not respond to Votebeat’s requests for comment or answer questions about whether he’d consider proposals to fund the changes. Toth did not respond to requests for comment.

Vote center model helps counties meet federal voting law

Created in 2003 by an election official in Larimer County, Colorado, the vote center model was designed to meet accessibility requirements stipulated in the Help America Vote Act of 2002. The federal law set aside money to address issues with outdated voting technology and voting access problems after the 2000 presidential election. The requirements were costly, and some counties would have had to provide additional voting equipment at hundreds of locations. The vote center model allowed them to offer fewer locations because voters could cast their ballots at any of them.

Texas began offering the option in 2006, after a Republican state representative introduced a bill establishing a pilot program. The bill won bipartisan support; participating counties were required to have electronic poll books and other voter registration management tools necessary to ensure that voters only cast a single ballot. In its most recent report to the Legislature, the Texas Secretary of State’s Office deemed the program successful and said it offers “a way to ensure that voters who plan to vote in the election have an increased opportunity to do so much as with early voting.”

Counties in every part of the state use the program, collectively encompassing roughly 14.9 million voters, or 83%, of the state’s registered voters, according to the Texas Secretary of State’s Office.

In East Texas’ Austin County, a rural community, many of the more than 30,000 residents commute east to Houston or north to Brenham for work. Others also travel west and south of the county daily. Countywide voting on election day has allowed election officials there to have polling locations in almost every corner of the county that any resident can use. For example, a voter who lives in Sealy, in the south of the county, and works in Houston can access a polling location on their way to and back along the I-10 corridor at a community hall. A voter from Bellville, the county seat, traveling an hour west to LaGrange can also find a polling location on the way.

A lawmaker campaigns against the program

The program’s most vocal critics, proponents of hand-counting ballots, have for years asserted that electronic voting equipment can be manipulated by election officials. In 2023, Hall was a featured speaker in an organized push to eliminate electronic voting equipment and to instead hand count ballots — a method experts say is more costly and more prone to errors and inaccuracies in vote counts.

That year, during the legislative session, Hall first filed a bill to get rid of the vote center program. It passed the Senate but did not advance in the House. This year, Hall is a member of the Senate State Affairs Committee, tasked with considering election and voting legislation. It’s very likely Hall’s legislation will again get a hearing in committee, though the program’s popularity among voters and county officials could weaken its chances in the House, said Daniel Griffith, senior director of policy at the Secure Democracy Foundation.

Most recently, critics of the program have tried to link Texas’ ballot secrecy problem to the use of the program. State officials and local election officials say that problem isn’t related to the use of the program. Rather, they said it stems from Texas’ push to make almost all election records public, allowing researchers, in some limited instances, to cross-reference different public records and find a specific voter’s ballot image. Even if the program were eliminated, that would still be possible under some circumstances.

Hall has publicly said the program has led to “unexplainable inconsistencies” in vote totals and prevents totals from being audited by individual precincts. Election officials say he is wrong about that, and current law requires them to reconcile totals and have the ability to produce reports of vote totals by precinct.

This year, Hall also filed legislation to eliminate electronic pollbooks — which counties are required to have in order to offer countywide voting — and voting machines currently in use by a majority of counties from the process. He has voiced support for eliminating the early voting period and having voters cast ballots in person only, and only at their assigned precinct.

Costs would rise for equipment, labor, and more

Jennifer Briggs, the elections administrator in Gregg County, a community with nearly 80,000 registered voters, said if the state approves eliminating the current voting equipment the county uses to participate in the program, more than $1 million in taxpayer dollars would go to waste.

In addition, paper poll books and paper ballots would require additional storage, with sophisticated climate control that the county currently lacks.

Briggs estimates the county could be on the hook for an additional $800,000 — which would include new equipment, materials, wages for election workers and additional polling locations, and other things.

Election administrators in some counties are already struggling to comply with legislation passed in 2023, which required them to increase the number of polling locations they operate and to increase the number of hours and days of early voting. Some have had trouble finding public buildings that comply with access requirements for voting sites. In other areas, where funding can’t stretch to pay for the additional required hours, election officials have had to shut down early voting sites, resulting in less access for voters. Eliminating the program would add to that burden.

In Austin County, Kim Rinn, the tax assessor-collector and election official, said she’s concerned that going back to precinct voting will increase the number of provisional ballots cast, because people who would have to go to a specific polling site could get confused and go to the wrong location.

“And those are not going to count,” Rinn said, because ballots are rejected if they are not cast at the right location. Austin County has been part of the program since 2022. Rinn said voters are used to it and it has helped run smoother local elections and ease voter confusion.

She added that eliminating the program could also have an impact on the budgets of school districts and cities in the county as they run their own elections. They, too, would have to increase the number of workers, equipment, and locations to staff if the program were to go away, she said.

“I wish lawmakers would take a look at everyone and not just folks in their districts,” Rinn said. “Every county has a reason for doing what they do.”

Natalia Contreras covers election administration and voting access for Votebeat in partnership with the Texas Tribune. She is based in Corpus Christi. Contact Natalia at ncontreras@votebeat.org

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.

These 5 Texas bills could expand voting access. Can they win bipartisan support?

2025-01-09T10:55:00+00:00

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

Republican lawmakers in Texas are signaling this year that they will continue pushing for restrictions on voting in the name of combating voter fraud, including ending countywide voting and requiring proof of citizenship to register.

But some efforts to expand voting access — including legislation that has come up in past legislative sessions — could gain bipartisan support, some policy experts say.

Bills that would expand the acceptable forms of ID voters can present at the polls and one that expands mail-voting access for people with disabilities, among others, have a chance to move forward, said Daniel Griffith, senior director of policy at the Secure Democracy Foundation, a nonprofit research group.

They’re not sure bets to become law, of course. The Republican-dominated Legislature since 2020 has consistently tightened voting laws and changed how elections are administered. And some of the bills introduced this year are the same ones that have stalled or failed in the past.

But every time one of those bills returns, even if it doesn’t get far, important work gets done behind the scenes — educating lawmakers and raising public awareness — to focus attention on the issues affecting voters, said Emily Eby French, policy director at Common Cause Texas.

“Even if the chances for pro-voter bills to move forward are slim, it’s still important to get the conversation going,” French said, adding that strong groundwork can help get such legislation over the finish line.

This year’s legislative session is set to begin Jan. 14. Here are some of the bills under consideration that could improve voter access:

Allowing online voter registration

Texas is one of only eight states in the country without online voter registration. It still uses a clumsy, paper-based system that has disenfranchised some eligible voters, an 2024 investigation by Votebeat found.

For more than a decade, Democratic state lawmakers have proposed legislation to allow online registration, and some Republican legislators have supported it. But the last time such a bill got a committee hearing was in 2015.

This session, at least three Democratic state representatives — John Bucy from Austin, Penny Morales Shaw from Houston, and Terry Meza from North Texas — have filed bills that would allow Texans to register to vote online. In the state Senate, Sen. Carol Alvarado, a Democrat from Houston, also filed a bill.

The bills require anyone using online registration to have a valid Texas-issued driver’s license or state ID. Similar laws have been enacted in Alabama, Kentucky, and Arizona.

Experts say the measure could save Texans millions of dollars and increase election security by improving the accuracy of the state’s voter rolls.

Extending vote-by-mail access for people with disabilities

Advocates have been pushing for years for a bill that would expand vote-by-mail access for voters with disabilities. It passed with bipartisan support last session, but Abbott vetoed it.

At least two similar versions of the bill have been reintroduced this session, by Bucy and Meza.

Chase Bearden, executive director of the Coalition of Texans with Disabilities, said he has been talking with Republican senators and state representatives, and “I do think we can work on a bipartisan solution that will work.”

The bill that Abbott vetoed would have allowed voters who need help casting a ballot, such as people who are visually impaired or are paralyzed, to do so “privately and securely” by requesting an electronic ballot and using a computer to mark their choices. The bill still would have required those voters to print out, sign, and return their ballots by mail. A similar tool is already available for overseas and military voters.

In a resolution explaining the veto, Abbott said the intent of the bill was “laudable,” but he believed it would allow “any voter who qualifies to vote by mail to receive a ballot electronically” without limiting it to disabled voters.

Accepting more forms of voter ID

Under current Texas’ voter ID requirement — modified after a federal court ruling that found the original 2011 law discriminatory — voters must show one of seven types of government-issued photo ID to vote, such as a state driver’s license, a passport, or a concealed-carry handgun license.

Voters who don’t have and cannot reasonably obtain one of those seven types can fill out a form at the polls and show an alternative form of ID, such as a utility bill, bank statement, government check, or a voter registration certificate.

Democrats, who count young voters as a key constituency, have for years filed proposals to expand the list to include photo IDs issued by Texas colleges and universities. And they’re doing it again this session.

Bucy filed a bill that would require election workers to accept a photo ID issued by a federally recognized tribe in Texas, an in-state college or university student photo ID, or a photo ID issued by a Texas state agency.

State Rep. Erin Zwiener, a Central Texas Democrat, filed a bill that details criteria for an acceptable student ID: The card would have to be unexpired, or no more than four years past expiration, and include the voter’s photograph, date of birth, and full legal name.

Restoring voting rights for Texans with felony convictions

Texans who have been convicted of a felony are not eligible to cast a ballot, until they have completed their sentence, including parole, supervision, and probation.

A bill introduced by state Sen. Sarah Eckhardt, a Democrat from Austin, would restore voting rights of people with a felony conviction upon their release from incarceration. In addition, a bill by Bucy would require the Texas Secretary of State’s Office to work with the Department of Criminal Justice and the Department of Public Safety to make it easier for Texans with felony convictions to learn when their voting rights are restored and how they can register to vote.

The time gap between when a person is released from incarceration and when they’ve satisfied other conditions of their sentence was a key issue in a 2016 illegal-voting case in Tarrant County that drew national attention. Crystal Mason was sentenced to five years in prison for casting a provisional ballot while on supervised release from a federal conviction. She later said she did not know she was ineligible to vote. Election safeguards prevented the vote from being counted.

Mason’s illegal-voting conviction was overturned last year, but she’s now fighting an effort by prosecutors to reverse that decision.

Removing some restrictions for voters who have moved

Under current law, people who miss the voter registration deadline, or registered voters who move to a different county after the deadline face some restrictions on voting.

They’re allowed to cast a limited ballot — with only statewide and federal races, depending on the election — and only during the early-voting period, at the main early-voting location. That location is typically the elections department headquarters or the county courthouse.

However, on election day, such voters can only cast a provisional ballot, or return to their former precinct to vote. If they cast a provisional ballot in the new location, it typically does not get counted, because the voter was not yet registered there.

A bill filed by Bucy would allow registered Texas voters who have moved but have yet to update their voter registration to cast a provisional ballot either during early voting or on election day. The provisional ballot would be counted once election officials check the voter’s eligibility and determine that the voter has not already voted in the election.

Natalia Contreras covers election administration and voting access for Votebeat in partnership with the Texas Tribune. She is based in Corpus Christi. Contact Natalia at ncontreras@votebeat.org.

Two changes that could speed up Wisconsin election results — and stave off conspiracy theories

2025-01-06T16:02:38+00:00

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

It’s a known risk for the municipal clerks who run Wisconsin elections: Starting at 7 a.m. on election day, they have around 16 hours to finish counting every vote, or they may start facing accusations of a fraudulent late-night “ballot dump.”

Those baseless allegations, which sometimes go viral, have plagued election officials across the state but especially in Milwaukee, where counting often finishes in the early morning hours after election day. Republican candidates have repeatedly cast suspicion on the timing of results in the largely Democratic city to explain away their statewide losses.

Currently, there’s little election officials can do to finish counting ballots sooner. Under state law, clerks must wait until the morning of election day to begin processing ballots and counting votes, even if they received those ballots weeks earlier.

Election officials are considering two strategies to change that. Both would require approval in the majority-Republican Legislature. At least one of them is highly likely to get signed into law in 2025.

One proposed measure would significantly simplify early in-person voting procedures. Currently, people who vote early in person receive and fill out absentee ballots, which get set aside in envelopes and aren’t processed or tabulated until election day. The proposal clerks are considering, which is similar to a measure that received some legislative support several years ago, would allow early voters instead to put their ballots right into a tabulator.

The other measure, which has been repeatedly pitched and then rejected in one or both legislative chambers, would allow election officials to get a one-day head start and begin processing absentee ballots on the Monday before the election. This past session, the proposal passed the Assembly but stalled in the Senate.

Early voting, without the envelopes

The direct early-voting measure appears unlikely to pass the Legislature in its current form. But experts say it would make elections more efficient and reduce the number of errors that the more complex process of casting and processing absentee ballots causes voters and election officials to make.

Currently, 47 states offer some form of early in-person voting, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures. Thirteen states, including Wisconsin, have in-person absentee voting, seven states have primarily mail voting with some early voting options, and 27 states have early in-person voting.

In Wisconsin, voters cast early in-person ballots at polling sites, but under state law, each ballot goes in an absentee ballot envelope that has to be signed by the voter, and filled out with a witness’s address and signature, almost as if they were voting by mail. The envelopes and ballots can’t be processed until election day, when poll workers have to verify that each ballot is properly signed and witnessed before counting it.

Processing these ballots as absentee ballots is time-consuming and invites errors, said Joshua Douglas, an election law professor at the University of Kentucky College of Law, who advocates for reducing the number of steps involved for voters and election officials.

The complications of the current early voting system became evident this year, when delays in the system used to print labels on absentee ballot envelopes, typically before voters fill out their ballot, forced voters to wait in long lines. That problem wouldn’t have come up if the early voting system had not relied on absentee-ballot procedures.

But even when it moves smoothly, the early voting system with absentee ballots requires extra work. For example, election workers typically serve as witnesses for absentee voters, signing and filling out their information for each voter. That requires an additional worker in many voting precincts.

Municipal clerks are discussing a proposal that would allow voters to cast ballots in person at their clerks’ offices as early as two weeks before the election, but to skip most of the absentee process — no witnesses, no signatures, no envelopes. Those voters would have to apply for an absentee ballot at the clerk’s office, but otherwise the process would be similar to voting on election day.

The ballots would be scanned by tabulators used specifically for early in-person voting, said Janesville Clerk Lorena Stottler, who’s also a co-chair of the Wisconsin Municipal Clerks Association’s legislative committee. Officials would wait until election day to generate the total number of votes from those ballots.

The proposal would reduce costs on multiple levels, Stottler said, since there wouldn’t be any absentee ballot envelopes, and fewer staff would be required in the early voting period and on election day to process absentee ballots. It would also lower the administrative costs of sorting absentee envelopes alphabetically and by ward, she said.

To ensure a high level of security, the proposal would require municipalities opting into the program to maintain a chain of custody, put cameras on the voting machines, and ensure that the tabulator saves an image of every ballot it scans, Stottler said.

Milwaukee, the state’s biggest city and typically among the last municipalities to finish counting votes, lobbied for such a proposal last year. Similar legislation came up in 2020, passing the Assembly but not the Senate.

Rep. Scott Krug, the former chair and current vice chair of the Assembly Elections Committee, said he could support some version of an early voting expansion, as long as all Wisconsin municipalities participated.

“My issue is finding a way to have availability in rural areas like mine,” said Krug, who lives in Nekoosa, a city of 2,500 in central Wisconsin. “So many towns have clerks with other full time obligations. I’d only support an expansion of early voting if access were equal across the board.”

That would include set hours, set days, and funding for smaller communities, he said, adding that he was willing to negotiate with advocates of the measure. In the past, funding election offices has been a tough sell in the Legislature.

Claire Woodall, former executive director of the Milwaukee Election Commission and a current senior adviser at the election reform group Issue One, said the early voting proposal could help election officials, especially if every municipality had the same early voting program.

And to reduce confusion and the potential for errors, Woodall said, it would be better to roll out such a program over multiple years, rather than in one go.

Michigan recently implemented a similar measure, allowing voters to cast ballots early in person and insert them directly into a tabulator. The Michigan early voting program runs for a minimum of nine consecutive days, but municipalities can offer the option for as many as 28 days total before an election. The change helped speed up election results in 2024 without leading to any notable issues.

Pre-processing ballots on Monday before election

The so-called Monday processing proposal appears likely to garner more support in the Legislature than it has in the past. For years, election officials have been lobbying for the proposal to allow election officials to begin processing ballots the Monday before an election day. Resistance from Republican lawmakers appears to be withering.

The proposal, election officials say, would speed up election results that have taken longer to report as more voters choose absentee voting. And critically, the earlier results could stave off false allegations about fraudulent late-night ballot dumps, like the ones then-President Donald Trump made about Milwaukee after his 2020 loss.

The Monday processing proposal, along with the early voting one, would help election officials finish counting ballots earlier, Woodall said.

Wisconsin’s most recently proposed early processing measure would have allowed election officials to start checking absentee ballot envelopes for voters’ identity and eligibility, open the envelopes, take out the ballots, and scan them through tabulators — but not tally them until election day.

But despite growing Republican support, the measure has faced GOP headwinds in the Legislature. In 2020, the proposal received public hearings in both chambers but never passed out of committee. In 2022, it passed the Senate but not the Assembly. This past session, it passed the Assembly but not the Senate.

The most significant opposition in the Senate this past session came from Sen. Dan Knodl, the Republican chair of the chamber’s election committee. He said that he didn’t trust Milwaukee enough to support the bill, and that he was concerned about the chain of custody for ballots. Other Republicans worried that there weren’t enough GOP election observers in Milwaukee to watch the Monday and Tuesday processes. Knodl’s opposition stalled the proposal. Assembly Speaker Robin Vos, a Republican, criticized the Senate’s inaction.

This upcoming session, Knodl is in the Assembly, and he’s not leading the election committee. One of the Senate’s top Republican leaders, Sen. Mary Felzkowski, said in December that she supports the proposal.

Alexander Shur is a reporter for Votebeat based in Wisconsin. Contact Alexander at ashur@votebeat.org.

What to watch for in 2025, according to election experts

2025-01-06T10:00:00+00:00

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

As we move beyond the long, anxious 2024 election cycle, we’re entering the 2026 and 2028 cycles with a largely unshaped landscape for elections. To help develop an outlook, we’ve decided to turn our first newsletter of the year over to people who are smarter than us: folks who participated in the experts desk Votebeat ran this past election cycle. Their expectations provide a first guess about what election debates will look like over the next several months.

The experts had much to say about what they expect this year, but for many of them, the debate over noncitizen voting safeguards is top of mind. Sylvia Albert, democracy and representation policy counsel at advocacy group Common Cause, thinks it might affect everything “from state laws that require proof of citizenship, to possible funding being tied to such requirements, voter purges that target naturalized citizens, and court cases around this topic” that she said could reshape longstanding federal voting statutes, including the National Voter Registration Act and the Help America Vote Act.

Liz Avore, senior adviser to Voting Rights Lab, which tracks state-level voting legislation, said her organization expects a “wave of legislation” this year related to noncitizen voting, such as “requiring voters to provide documentary proof of citizenship, like a passport or birth certificate, when they register to vote.”

Joshua Douglas, election law professor at the University of Kentucky, also expects such a focus. “This is unfortunate given that we know that noncitizens do not vote to any significant degree,” he said, “just as we know that in-person impersonation fraud does not occur to any measurable degree.”

While David Levine, senior elections integrity fellow at the Alliance for Securing Democracy, is on the lookout for proof-of-citizenship legislation like everyone else, he’s also expecting legislation on “stricter voter ID requirements, and more election police units like the one created in Florida a couple of years ago.”

For his part, Trey Grayson, Kentucky’s former Republican secretary of state and managing director of law firm Frost, Brown, Todd, is hoping to see local election administrators continue to work with legislatures to introduce what he describes as “continuous improvement” bills. These types of bills rarely make headlines but proactively look for ways to make the voting process better. “Utah and Kentucky are two states that have done this quite successfully over the past few years,” he said. “I hope that more states do so in 2025.”

Sam Oliker-Friedland, executive director of the Institute for Responsive Government, a policy think tank, said his organization will be watching for “opportunities to further commonsense policy solutions like early voting,” even in states where that previously seemed unlikely. “This is primarily due to a shift in narratives around these policies indicating what we’ve known for a while: Pro-voter policies impact voters of all backgrounds and political makeup,” he said.

Finally, experts are interested to see what happens with voters’ trust in elections. “I expect we’ll see a big increase in trust from the winning party, and I’m watching to see if that’s a lasting return to trust or if it’s a temporary reprieve,” said Ben Adida, co-founder of Voting Works.

“What will it take to have justifiable confidence in the trustworthiness of our elections every time, no matter who wins?” asked Pamela Smith, CEO and president of Verified Voting. “We are closely monitoring any attempts disguised as election security legislation that will instead disenfranchise voters and dismantle voting rights.”

Did they miss something? Tell us what you are looking out for this year.

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

Texas Republicans want voters to provide proof of citizenship. Arizona’s law holds lessons.

2024-12-19T10:55:00+00:00

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

Republicans are making a big push for legislation requiring Texans to provide proof of citizenship to register to vote, and key lawmakers are signaling that they’ll make it a priority next year.

The push is part of a national effort by the GOP and conservative allies who assert that such legislation is needed to stop noncitizens from illegally casting ballots, even though such cases are already very rare.

Texas Republican lawmakers have filed at least five bills so far ahead of the legislative session opening in January. It’s too early to tell which ones could get traction when the session starts. Some of the bills appear to be modeled after federal legislation considered earlier this year by the U.S. Congress, where the measure passed the House but stalled in the Senate. At least one calls for placing a proposed constitutional amendment on the ballot next year for voters to consider. Others mirror a law adopted 20 years ago in Arizona, the only state that currently enforces a proof of citizenship requirement for voters.

Because of conflicts between Arizona’s law and federal voting rights laws, Arizona maintains a split voter roll, with a small percentage of residents who haven’t provided proof of citizenship and are allowed to cast ballots only in federal elections. The makeup of the “federal only” list shows how certain demographic groups — including Native voters and young people — are at greater risk of being disenfranchised over citizenship documentation requirements, a Votebeat analysis has found.

If Texas were to adopt a similar system, experts say, it could also potentially disenfranchise citizens, because research has found that millions of Americans — for various reasons — do not have access to documents that prove their citizenship.

And, as in Arizona, such a law could impose new administrative burdens for election officials who would need additional training and resources in order to comply.

“This will be something that affects you if you’re young, if you’re old, if you’re Republican, if you’re Democrat, it really doesn’t matter,” said Jasleen Singh, legal counsel for the democracy program at the Brennan Center for Justice at NYU Law, a voting rights nonprofit that has studied the potential effects of requiring proof of citizenship to register to vote. State lawmakers are putting “millions of people at risk of not being able to meet those requirements,” Singh said.

The effects of Arizona’s citizenship proof law

Under federal law, all U.S. voters must attest to their citizenship to register, but they do not need to prove it. Voter registrars in counties across the country have processes in place to check that only eligible citizens make it onto the voter rolls.

Experts say noncitizen voting cases are rare and there is no evidence that they have affected election outcomes. Voting leaves an extensive paper trail, and noncitizens who illegally cast ballots face criminal penalties, including the loss of their residency status and deportation.

Arizona’s law requiring proof of citizenship to register to vote was passed in 2004, and prompted lengthy legal fights that continue even now. In 2013, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that Arizona must allow residents who do not provide such proof to cast ballots in federal elections. That ruling led to the current split system with the “federal only” voter list.

In Arizona, “federal only” voters make up less than 1% of the state’s voter roll — or 34,933 out of around 4.4 million active voters eligible for this past November election. A Votebeat analysis found that the list includes disproportionately high numbers of voters who live on Native land, on college campuses, and at the state’s main homeless campus. Such voters also were generally younger than the voting-age population in the state, and were less likely to vote this past November than voters who had provided proof of citizenship, the analysis found.

Arizona has struggled to maintain the lists accurately. Officials discovered this summer that for decades, the state has been labeling some voters as having provided proof of U.S. citizenship, when in fact they had never been asked to do so. The confusion stemmed from the fact that some Arizonans who obtained drivers licenses before 1996 were exempted from the requirement. The Arizona Secretary of State’s Office estimated that around 218,000 voters were affected.

Twenty years after it was enacted, Arizona’s proof-of-citizenship requirement remains the only one in the country that is actively enforced. But conservative activists and Republicans around the country have been rallying support for more such laws by raising alarms about the risk of noncitizen voting.

It’s a politically savvy move, said Brandon Rottinghaus, a political science professor at the University of Houston. “Republicans can say they are tough on immigration, border security and illegal voting, too.”

In Texas this summer, Gov. Greg Abbott issued a press release boasting that the state had removed more than potential 6,500 noncitizens from its voter rolls. An investigation by ProPublica, The Texas Tribune, and Votebeat found the governor’s figure was likely inflated and, in some cases, wrong.

Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton sued the federal government in October, claiming the Department of Homeland Security has refused to help the state check the citizenship status of some registered voters. The federal agency offers states access to a database that can be used to verify immigration status, but Paxton argued it’s inadequate and requires a fee for each verification.

What the Texas bills call for

The five bills filed in Texas so far vary in their details.

Sen. Bryan Hughes, a Republican from northeast Texas, first introduced a bill requiring proof of citizenship during the 2023 legislative session. The bill was approved by the Senate, but never got a hearing in the House. In a bill analysis, Hughes cited the 2013 U.S. Supreme Court decision that allowed Arizona to move forward and called for a similar system. He has now reintroduced the same bill as Senate Bill 309, which would task the Texas Secretary of State with crafting a process and rules to require voters to submit proof of citizenship to the registrar. Hughes did not respond to requests for comment.

At a legislative hearing in October, Hughes said the legislation is a major priority. “We need to get it done,” he said.

A blank voter registration card at the Nueces County Courthouse on Wed., Sept. 11, 2024 in Corpus Christi, Texas.

In the Texas House of Representatives, House Bill 892, filed by Rep. Briscoe Cain, a Republican from East Texas, mirrors some of the requirements in place in Arizona and also some from the federal SAVE Act, sponsored by U.S. Rep. Chip Roy, a Texas Republican, and pending in Congress. The Cain legislation would require voters to present one of the following: a certified copy of a U.S. birth certificate; a U.S. passport or passport card; a naturalization certificate; or a consular report of birth abroad issued by the U.S. State Department.

Cain’s bill would also allow volunteer deputy registrars — who conduct voter registration outreach at community events and college campuses but aren’t employed by counties — to check for proof of citizenship.

Cain’s bill would have to pass the state Legislature and then be approved by voters next year. Arizona’s law was also created through a ballot proposition. Cain did not respond to requests for comment.

Rep. Brooks Landgraf, a Republican from West Texas, filed House Bill 219. In addition to birth certificates, passports, and naturalization certificates, Landgraf’s bill would allow voters to provide a Texas driver’s license or a state ID. The bill also requires voter registrars to follow up with the voter to ensure they provide the required documentation if the application was mailed or faxed. Landgraf could not be reached for comment.

None of the bills that identify a list of acceptable documents include tribal documents, which Arizona does accept. The legislators did not respond to Votebeat’s questions about whether they would consider including them.

Arizona law took years to straighten out

Experts warn that a proof of citizenship requirement could have unintended consequences for voters and election officials, and must be crafted carefully.

Tammy Patrick, who was the elections administrator in Arizona’s Maricopa County from 2003 to 2014, said it took election officials years to effectively implement the proof of citizenship requirement there. There were hours of additional training for election workers and money spent on voter education outreach so voters could be aware of the new rules, among other things.

A lot of time and resources were also spent on verifying voters’ information, Patrick said.

Initially, the law required naturalized voters to provide a number from their naturalization certificates to verify their citizenship status. But officials later found the number the law asked for could not be used to verify that information. The law also wasn’t clear on whether officials could accept an expired U.S. passport as proof of citizenship, Patrick said.

Over time, the law had to be updated to clarify which documents could be accepted.

Election officials must also verify voters’ information and compare it to state and federal data to check citizenship status. That information wasn’t always up to date or accurate, Patrick said.

In some instances, longtime voters who’d never missed their opportunity to cast their ballot found that when they moved from one county to another, they had to re-register but didn’t have the documents they needed to provide proof of citizenship.

“People think it sounds easy. It sounds like it makes sense. Why wouldn’t you have to prove your citizenship, right?” said Patrick, who is now the CEO for programs at the National Association of Election Officials. “But there are details in the implementation that get very messy very quickly.”

In Texas, some voter registrars have a lot of questions about how implementing this requirement would work in their offices and what exactly would be required of voters.

Chris Davis, the voter registration division director in Travis County, home to Austin, says lawmakers should consider how these rules would work in tandem with requirements officials already have to follow.

If election officials are tasked with verifying citizenship, that’ll likely require an update of training materials for election workers, Davis said.

“Then there’s the responsibility (and) liability that you’re putting on volunteer deputy registrars, if they are part of the process … Are they the ones that get to handle those documents?” Davis said. “It just doesn’t work in terms of, who’d want to entrust a passport or a birth certificate to a VDR? These are very, very precious documents.”

If such documentation has to be stored as part of the voters’ record, he said, it will become public information and will have to be redacted before being released publicly, which will also take time and likely additional workers. None of these steps would be as easy to pull off in smaller counties already short on funds, he said.

“The legislature should really think this through in terms of unintended consequences and in ensuring security of these documents and in understanding the time that’s going to be required to process these,” Davis said.

Natalia Contreras covers election administration and voting access for Votebeat in partnership with the Texas Tribune. She is based in Corpus Christi. Contact Natalia at ncontreras@votebeat.org

4 ways Arizona can get faster election results

2024-12-11T10:00:00+00:00

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

Four days after the election, with several congressional and state contests yet to be called, Arizona Senate President Warren Petersen declared that it had “taken too much time” to count ballots.

So Petersen made a promise to voters: He would reintroduce bills in the upcoming legislative session “to get election results, night of.”

It was perfectly normal to not yet have final results at that point. In fact, it has sometimes taken as long as two weeks to finish counting ballots in the state, a timeline similar to that of other states that are friendly to voting by mail, such as California and Utah.

But as national attention on Arizona, a swing state where contests can be close, has ramped up, pressure has mounted to count faster. And as unexpected delays sprang up across the state this year, including in rural counties that typically count quickly, the longer timeline fueled consternation among candidates and voters waiting for final results.

Petersen, a Republican, is one of many officials who have said they want faster results next time around. Secretary of State Adrian Fontes, a Democrat, along with other state lawmakers and nearly all Maricopa County supervisors, have also said this is a priority.

So far, solutions leaders have proposed have taken aim at just one part of the system: a state law allowing voters to drop off their early ballots at polling places on election day. Hundreds of thousands of Arizona voters do this, and it’s a major reason why counting extends so far past election day.

But it’s not the only reason, and changing that law is not the only possible solution. It also may not be politically feasible. Gov. Katie Hobbs, a Democrat, has said she would kill any bills that would limit voting access, including any limiting early ballot drop-offs.

Other potential responses include shortening the ballot, buying new types of machines, and adding staff. Some of those options could increase costs for county governments.

Here’s a rundown of some of the changes that could speed up Arizona election results:

Change early ballot drop-off laws

The focus of the main proposals circulating right now involve limiting when, where, or how voters can cast the ballots sent to them in the mail. These are generally referred to as “early ballots” in Arizona. The state was an early adopter of mail voting and early voting options.

Early voting begins around a month before election day, but a good percentage of voters wait until then to return their ballots. In Maricopa County this presidential election, around 1 in 10 voters, or 225,000 people, dropped off their ballot on Election Day.

These last-minute ballot drop-offs take time to process and count. The voter signature must be verified, and voters with mismatched signatures are given five days to verify their identity. The ballots then need to be removed from the envelopes, inspected, and prepared for counting.

Maricopa County Supervisor Thomas Galvin, a Republican, is among those supporting a change to state law to prohibit voters from dropping off early ballots at polling locations on election day. This would mean counties have fewer ballots to process on election day, so they can more easily post the results on the night of the election.

As part of the proposal, Galvin wants a new state law to require government buildings to function as polling sites, if needed. If early ballot drop-offs are banned on Election Day, he said, more polling sites — such as schools — would in fact be needed to deal with the corresponding increase in voting on that day.

Another option: prohibiting voters from dropping off ballots at polling locations on election day, but allowing them to drop them off at one central location. That’s what Florida does, and that’s a big reason why the state is able to post the majority of results on election night.

Petersen said he and others recently spoke with Florida Secretary of State Cord Byrd, and will introduce a bill following that state’s model of only allowing early ballots to be dropped off at the county recorder’s office on election day.

His bill will also eliminate the requirement to verify the signatures of voters casting an early ballot in person during early voting, because these voters already show identification.

Another bill has already been filed by GOP Sen. J.D. Mesnard, for the legislative session that begins in January. Mesnard’s bill would require any voter who drops off their mail ballot at a polling location on election day to show identification.

That would cut back on the post-election processing time considerably, without banning drop offs entirely or restricting them to a single location.

Some voting rights groups believe that requiring ID at the polls is burdensome for voters who might not have it readily available. But Mesnard said he believes most people support voter ID laws, and he sees this as a reasonable trade-off for faster results.

Make a shorter ballot

The ballot in eight of Arizona’s 15 counties was so long this November that some contests spilled onto a second sheet of paper. The two-page ballot meant double the paper for counties to process, which caused most of the counting delays across the state.

The main reason the ballot was so long is because state lawmakers referred 11 propositions to the ballot, which took up a lot of space. This was a way for the Republicans, who controlled the Legislature, to bypass Gov. Katie Hobbs, a Democrat, and get their ideas in front of voters without fighting through a gubernatorial veto.

Alex Gulotta, Arizona director for the voting rights group All Voting is Local, called the legislative referrals “excessive.”

“We could, in fact, pass a law limiting the number of legislative referrals specifically to protect our election administration,” he said. “That would be a wise thing to do.”

So far, no lawmakers have proposed such a restriction.

Buy new machines to count votes faster

Using machines instead of humans to perform time-consuming tasks could also speed up the process.

In Maricopa County, that would mean buying envelope openers, for example. And other counties could switch to using computers to help review and decide voter intent when voters leave questionable marks.

Some other large counties in the U.S. with a lot of vote-by-mail ballots use machines to open ballots.

For example, Orange County, California — which in November processed about 1.1 million mail ballots compared with 1.8 million in Maricopa County — owns equipment to straighten the envelopes to prepare them for opening; these are also known as “jogging” machines. And it owns 16 mail extraction devices to open the envelopes and extract the ballots.

Incoming county supervisors have indicated a willingness to spend to speed up results. The extractors cost about $42,000 each, with a $1,250 annual maintenance charge, according to Bob Page, Orange County’s registrar of voters.

Without them, Page said, “sorting and examining ballots by hand would be a much slower process.”

While Maricopa County uses a computer program to help teams of workers quickly decide voter intent, a process called “electronic adjudication,” most other counties instead have workers duplicate the voter choices clearly onto a new ballot. That slowed down the process considerably this year.

That was the main reason why it took Pinal County 24 hours to count ballots cast on Election Day, for example.

Cochise County, at least, is considering switching to using electronic adjudication in the future, according to Joe Casey, associate county administrator overseeing elections.

Add staff to process ballots faster

Hiring and training more people to handle ballots would shorten the counting period by days in some counties.

Small counties, in particular, struggled to process the two-page ballot with their small staff. It took longer than anticipated just to open the envelopes and inspect the two pages, and to decide voter intent where it was unclear.

Yuma County, for example, was the last to finish, just barely meeting its Nov. 21 deadline set by state law to certify results. County supervisors during the public meeting to certify results said that they wanted to ensure, in future elections, the elections staff had what they needed to do the job more quickly.

County Recorder Richard Colwell told them that he had asked them to hire more staff members prior to the election, but they declined to increase his budget.

Colwell said in an interview that the county only has five staff members in voter registration and three in elections to count all 69,000 ballots cast, and he had unsuccessfully asked for two more staff members. His staff worked 80 to 100 hours the week of the election, he said.

“I told you we were going to get slammed,” he told supervisors during the meeting.

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

Texas lawmakers are mostly silent on addressing threats to ballot secrecy

2024-11-25T11:00:00+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.

This story was produced in collaboration with the Texas Newsroom, a public radio journalism collaboration that includes NPR, KERA in North Texas, Houston Public Media, KUT in Austin, Texas Public Radio in San Antonio and other stations across the state.

Listen to a radio version of this story here:

Bgainey · GAINEY Ballot Secrecy Lege FINAL

Texas officials had to issue emergency guidance this year to patch holes in new election transparency laws that threatened to expose the choices people made on their ballots.

Now that the 2024 election is over, the issue of protecting ballot secrecy is receiving renewed attention in both the courts and the Legislature.

A national conservative nonprofit last week filed a federal lawsuit against Harris County, alleging the county isn’t taking steps to protect voters’ right to a secret ballot. Another case involving an activist who claims to have uncovered the ballot choices of more than 60,000 voters is ongoing.

And Republican state Rep. Ryan Guillen proposed a bill this month that would make it a felony for individuals to obtain information that could tie voters back to their ballot choices.

It’s the first concrete sign that lawmakers plan to tackle the ballot secrecy issue since an investigation by Votebeat and the Texas Tribune in May showed how laws touted as increasing election transparency have made it possible — in limited instances — to determine how individuals voted, using publicly available records and data.

How push for records unlocked voters’ choices

The push for increased transparency gained momentum after the 2020 presidential election when then-former President Donald Trump successfully convinced activists statewide that the election had been stolen from him. In an effort to uncover evidence of voter fraud, they began filing open-records requests for original voted ballots and cast-vote records — anonymized electronic representations of how each voter voted — in almost every Texas county.

At the time, the law said voted ballots had to be kept private for 22 months after an election. But in 2022, Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton released a non-binding legal opinion advising county officials to release voted ballots as soon as they are counted, while redacting any information that could identify the voter.

After at least three counties challenged Paxton’s advice in court, the Texas Legislature rewrote the law to allow public access to ballot images, cast-vote records, and the original voted ballot just 61 days after an election.

In the past three years, the requests for election records have become more expansive, election officials said. Activists are now requesting copies of voting equipment manuals, data from election servers, and other information produced by voting equipment, including electronic poll books used to check in voters at polling locations.

Officials came face to face with the risks of releasing these records in May, when the conservative news site Current Revolt published what it said was the image of the ballot that former Republican Party of Texas Chair Matt Rinaldi cast in the March 5 Republican primary.

The site did not explain how it obtained the ballot, or how it linked it to Rinaldi, but Votebeat and the Tribune were able to verify that such a match was possible. Using public records, reporters were able to identify the choices of voters who’d cast ballots in precincts with a small number of voters.

That same month, longtime conservative activist Laura Pressley claimed in a federal lawsuit that she had discovered an “algorithmic pattern” in public records that allowed her to link 60,000 Williamson County voters to their ballot choices. Her lawsuit, which is still pending, alleges that a failure by state and local election officials to comply with a ballot-numbering law has allowed her to match voters to their ballots.

Pressley has been reluctant to share details of the purported “algorithmic pattern” with state officials. Still, the Secretary of State’s office this year directed election officials who use electronic poll books to print serial numbers on the ballots to stop doing so, and to switch to paper with preprinted ballot numbers, which must be redacted before being released to requestors.

How will the Legislature respond?

State and local election officials said they had been concerned about the risks to ballot secrecy for some time as lawmakers made it easier to access voter data. But it wasn’t until after the May disclosures that Paxton and Secretary of State Jane Nelson issued additional guidance to election officials, ordering more redactions and instructing them to stop releasing information that can help expose how people voted.

Conservative election activists have been vocal about their opposition to redactions and lengthening the timeline to make ballot images public. Such moves, they say, would prevent them from performing their own election audits.

In a legislative hearing this summer, state Sen. Paul Bettencourt, a Republican from Houston, said he believed there could be bipartisan support for other measures, such as a bill that would require information from small precincts to be aggregated into larger ones. That was one of the solutions outlined by Christina Adkins, the elections division director in the Secretary of State’s office, to better anonymize voters who cast ballots in precincts where few others are cast.

Bettencourt could not be reached for comment. A spokesperson for his office told Votebeat in an email that he plans to file legislation to try to solve ballot secrecy concerns.

As of late last week, Guillen’s bill was the only one filed related to the issue. Guillen, of Rio Grande City, did not respond to a request for an interview.

State Rep. Terry Wilson, R-Marble Falls, and Rep. John Bucy, D-Austin, co-authored the bill in 2023 that expanded access to election records. Wilson did not respond to Votebeat’s request for comment. In an emailed statement, Bucy said “ballot secrecy is a foundational feature of our electoral system” and that “robust conversations” between the secretary of state’s office and local elections officials are ongoing. “We intend to continue that work and provide them the support and tools they need to protect voter privacy,” he said.

Some voting rights advocates say that without some action from lawmakers, voters will be vulnerable to breaches of privacy, harassment, and intimidation.

“You’re guaranteed a secret ballot. That is something that you take into the polling place with you. And if you can’t count on that, then our concern would be that folks who might otherwise vote, may not due to fear,” said Elisabeth MacNamara, vice president of advocacy for the League of Women Voters of Texas.

Latest lawsuit targets countywide polling place program

The federal lawsuit against Harris County filed last week by the national conservative nonprofit group Public Interest Legal Foundation alleges that the county’s voting system violated at least three voters’ right to a secret ballot. The plaintiffs allege that Harris County officials failed to follow the state’s directive and released unredacted election records.

The suit says the county’s use of the countywide polling place program — which nearly 100 Texas counties use — along with publicly available records puts voters’ secret ballots at risk. County election officials and officials with the Texas Secretary of State have previously denied that the countywide polling place program poses a threat to ballot secrecy. State Sen. Bob Hall, R-Edgewood, has filed legislation to eliminate the program.

Caroline Kane, a voter in Harris County who was the GOP candidate for a U.S. House seat, states in the lawsuit that the ballot she cast in the March 5 Republican primary was disclosed and made public. The lawsuit states that she is “concerned about the negative effects of the lack of secrecy regarding her ballot and potentially facing retribution from those who have discovered her ballot.” Kane lost to Democrat Lizzie Fletcher.

Kane and the two other plaintiffs are asking the court to prevent Harris County from releasing voters’ identifiable information in ballot images and electronic poll book data. They’re also asking the court to order county election officials to “abstain from viewing information that may lead to the discovery of a voter’s ballot and from identifying to anyone a voter’s vote or ballot.”

The lawsuit was filed in the U.S. District Court in Houston.

A spokesperson for the Public Interest Legal Foundation said in an email that the organization is “seeking a ruling that the US Constitution supports the right to a secret ballot and that right is being violated. We have no exact proposed solution. That is up to the county or state.”

Harris County officials did not respond to requests for comment.

Local officials are left with an arduous task

While lawmakers have said little about the issue — outside of two public hearings in the spring — local election officials are scrambling to ensure that voters’ ballot secrecy is protected.

Linking a voter to their specific ballot choices isn’t easy. It requires a process of elimination and the use of multiple public records. It is more likely to succeed in circumstances involving less populous counties, small precincts, and low-turnout elections.

Regardless, pending legislative action, all counties have to follow directives from the secretary of state, spending significant time and resources on redacting any type of information that could tie a voter to their ballot choices. In some counties, these steps have required additional manpower and costly computer software.

In Guadalupe County, east of San Antonio, election administrator Lisa Hayes is bracing herself for an onslaught of public records requests. While working to meet state-mandated post-election deadlines and preparing for local runoff elections, she’s also trying to figure out how she’ll handle the redaction of more than 80,000 ballots cast this November. She may purchase special software or resort to printing out the documents, redacting information by hand with a black marker, and scanning the ballots back in.

“It’s going to be a huge undertaking,” she said, adding that she wished lawmakers would clarify where these steps “fall in the priority list” of deadlines, requirements, and advisories county elections offices are required to adhere to.

Tammy Patrick, CEO of programs at the National Association of Election Officials, said further guidance from the legislature and the secretary of state is necessary to help counties prevent errors when redacting thousands of ballots

“Because if you have one county doing it one way, and across the state, it’s being done 10 other ways, that’s going to cause additional confusion and problems like lawsuits on equal protection and other issues,” Patrick said.

Natalia Contreras covers election administration and voting access for Votebeat in partnership with the Texas Tribune. Contact Natalia at ncontreras@votebeat.org.

The GOP will dominate Washington. What does that mean for your elections?

2024-11-25T10:00:00+00:00

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

President-elect Donald Trump has spent years publicly raging over how the country conducts its elections, including baseless conspiracy theories and inaccurate information in his criticisms. Congressional Republicans have often echoed him.

Now Trump is set to retake office in January, and Republicans will control both houses of Congress. So what changes will they be able to make with their new power?

Will they upend elections based on the right-wing suspicions Trump has stoked since 2020? Will they pursue long-held conservative priorities like proof-of-citizenship requirements for voting? Or will they take a cue from Republican or nonpartisan state election officials based on what they say works best?

As a practical matter, Congress’ impact may be limited. It has authority over the “times, places and manner” of federal elections, but the states control most things about elections. And the Republicans will have only narrow majorities in the House and Senate — too narrow to pass anything on a partisan vote unless House Republicans are near-unanimous, and not enough to overcome a filibuster in the Senate.

On top of that, congressional leaders aren’t signaling plans to turn to major election legislation in January. Talk of the new government’s initial priorities has focused on confirming Trump’s cabinet nominees, and major tax legislation.

Still, Republicans are starting to talk publicly about what a unified GOP-led government could do.

Some Republicans who have supported Trump’s past allegations about the 2020 election are pushing for big changes to existing law. For example, Cleta Mitchell, a Republican lawyer whose Election Integrity Network became a coordinating force for grassroots activists, is calling on the GOP to push through a major overhaul of three bedrock federal statutes governing elections: the National Voter Registration Act, the Help America Vote Act, and the Uniformed and Overseas Citizens Absentee Voting Act.

All three have been in force for decades. And all three “are very problematic,” Mitchell said during an interview with conservative news outlet Blaze News earlier this month.

Mitchell has posted on social media that, among other things, she wants to “eliminate all touch screens, ballot marking devices, electronic voting.” In their place, she wants “paper ballots, hand marked,” she said, so that voting is like the College Board’s SAT (though that is now computerized).

Mitchell also called on Congress to pass legislation requiring proof of citizenship to register to vote, something that appears to have broad support across the GOP, including from Trump. The legislation, known as the SAVE Act, passed the House before, but stalled in the Democratic-controlled Senate; it would need 60 votes to overcome a filibuster.

There are other ideas, too. Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, a Republican who has publicly and repeatedly refuted false assertions about election fraud, is promoting a slate of proposals he has referred to as the “Georgia plan,” which he said would build public trust.

Most Americans support some form of a photo ID requirement and want to make sure only citizens are voting, he said at an American Enterprise Institute event in Washington on Nov. 18.

Other proposals in his Georgia plan would prioritize efficiency in voting and fast results. They include measures to keep lines as short as possible, require all mail ballots to arrive by Election Day — with some exceptions for military and overseas ballots — and ensure that voter rolls are as updated and accurate as possible.

Raffensperger also promoted having all states share information so they can account for voters who move, die, or have other changes in status. Accurate voter rolls, he said, help reassure the public that close elections are being decided by eligible voters.

One option for that information exchange, he noted, already exists: the Electronic Registration Information Center, or ERIC, a multistate coalition set up to help states clean their voter rolls. Georgia is still a member, but since 2022, several Republican-led states have withdrawn amid a campaign by some conservative publications and activists against the coalition. Others have yet to join, and Raffensperger said some states struggle with the cost of participating.

Raffensperger suggested that the federal government could use a grant program to entice states to join ERIC or a similar coalition in service of the cleanest possible voter rolls. Alluding to the ongoing criticism of ERIC, he acknowledged the coalition might have to be revamped in some bipartisan way, and said there would also have to be a bipartisan commitment to work through any “pain points.”

In response to a question about modernizing the National Voter Registration Act, Raffensperger said it can be tightened to protect the integrity of voter rolls. The law currently requires states to stop systematic cleaning of voter rolls 90 days before a federal election, but if states are using “objective information” to update voter rolls, he said, they should be permitted to do so up until a state’s deadline for registering to vote.

It isn’t clear what legislation a Republican Congress might consider, or whether any proposal could also win Democratic votes.

The SAVE Act, for example, had 104 co-sponsors in the House this Congress — but no Democrats signed on.

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.

Proposed Michigan Voting Rights Act needs fine-tuning, election officials say

2024-10-22T09:00:00+00:00

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

The Michigan Voting Rights Act, a package of four bills moving through the Legislature, has a weighty name and a noble purpose: to serve the state’s voters better.

But some people whose job is to serve the voters say the legislation makes them a little nervous.

Supporters say the bills will supplement the federal Voting Rights Act, which passed in 1965 but has been slowly eroded by court decisions. Opponents say it’ll be expensive and invasive, and create a dangerous precedent inside polling places.

And clerks, who would have to actually administer elections under the new rules, say they have a lot of concerns about the MVRA, though some are not prepared to think about about laws that wouldn’t come into play until next year at the soonest as they prepare for a general election that’s already underway.

“I’m not really excited about this as it stands,” said Michael Siegrist, Canton Township clerk and second vice president of the Michigan Association of Municipal Clerks.

He and other clerks say they’re nervous about the potential costs that would largely be passed on to municipalities as well as the proposed consequences for what could be simple human errors in the course of running an election.

The state municipal clerks association is officially neutral on the package of bills, as is its county-level counterpart, the Michigan Association of County Clerks. Both groups had a hand in shaping the legislation, but say there’s still room for improvement.

At its core, the bills aim to prevent voter suppression, expand ballot access to more language communities, create a statewide voting data clearinghouse, and clarify protections for voters who need help casting their ballot.

But half a dozen local clerks around the state told Votebeat that they’re so focused on preparing for the November election, that they can’t even consider what the changes under the proposed legislation could mean for their community. Already, several clerks said, this year’s election looks different from past elections because of a string of legislative and constitutional changes in recent years, including the introduction of early in-person voting, which started Saturday in Detroit and will begin in other municipalities no later than Oct. 26.

“The concern is they are about to pass another very complicated bill that has penalties for local election officials who are really trying their hardest to actually deliver the elections under this new framework that has called for the largest enfranchisement of voters in Michigan history,” Siegrist said.

Although the bills passed through the Michigan Senate last month, there is still a lot of time to change them. Rep. Penelope Tsernoglou, an East Lansing Democrat who chairs the House elections committee, said the bills likely won’t come before the committee before November.

Some of the changes election officials say they hope to see would require some significant rewrites before the bills became law.

The bills are a legislative priority for Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson, a Democrat. As with many voting reforms, their ultimate scope — not to mention their passage — depends on the Democrats’ narrow majority in the Michigan Legislature, which is at stake in the November election.

MVRA would require more support for language groups

The name of the legislation is purposeful. The Michigan Voting Rights Act seeks to tackle much of what the federal Voting Rights Act initially did: expand ballot access for voters who use languages other than English, and stop local and state governments from imposing new laws that could create barriers to voting based on disability, race, or other factors.

Recent court decisions have chipped away at many such protections in the federal law.

“Candidly, it’s incumbent on the state to take on the mantle and provide protection to our voters that they once enjoyed under federal law,” said Ingham County Clerk Barb Byrum, a supporter of the legislation.

But in some areas, the MVRA seeks to go beyond what the federal Voting Rights Act once offered.

Section 203 of the Voting Rights Act, for instance, requires jurisdictions around the country to offer language assistance to voters if more than 5% of voting-age citizens are in the same language minority group and don’t understand English well enough to use it to vote. The act focuses on languages with “a history of exclusion,” according to the Department of Justice, which primarily means Spanish, as well as Asian and Native American languages.

In Michigan, Section 203 has required some western Michigan communities, such as Fennville and Clyde and Covert townships to offer election materials, such as ballots, instructions, and assistance in Spanish, while Hamtramck in Wayne County must offer them in Bengali.

Arabic, a language common to many communities around the state, is not included among the language groups federally designated as having a history of exclusion under Section 203. But under the Michigan Voting Rights Act, it would be covered in several places.

The legislation would expand language support to any language community that doesn’t understand English well and makes up more than 5% or more than 10,000 of the voting-age citizens in an area. Starting in 2030, the threshold would drop to 600 people total, or 2.5% of voting-age citizens, as long as that 2.5% was more than 100 people.

It would be a significant expansion of the language protection, Byrum said, but a necessary one.

More than 530,000 Michiganders older than 18 speak a language other than English, according to data from the Census Bureau. More than a quarter of those people speak Spanish.

In a large city like Detroit, the changes proposed by the MVRA would likely require support in Spanish, Arabic, and other languages, based on Census Bureau data.

Implementing such support — including translations of complex ballot issues, plus printing of election materials — would increase the costs of elections significantly. Logic and accuracy testing, used to ensure each voting machine registers votes properly, would also take longer because of the number of ballot styles.

Because the current versions of the bills don’t allocate separate funding, clerks would likely have to take resources away from other functions.

Cheri Hardmon, spokesperson for the Department of State, said the department believes lawmakers should address funding at the same time that the House considers the bills.

“We will continue to work with the legislature to ensure that any bills that get passed into law are as strong as possible and address the concerns of voters and clerks alike,” Hardmon said.

To achieve that, Siegrist said, legislators would likely need to reshape the language sections to make the requirements more feasible.

“Other states have been able to deliver ballots and materials to language minorities ... in a more efficient manner that’s inclusive and accessible and cost-effective,” he said. “I would love to see our legislature look at that.”

California is one state that requires communities to go further than federal law in providing language access. In Los Angeles County, for instance, Section 203 requires ballot access in five languages, including Spanish and Chinese, while state law requires 14 additional languages, including Farsi, Japanese, and Russian.

In California, the state requires certain polling places to make at least one translated copy of the ballot available for voters to look at alongside their English-language ballot. Voters can use it as a reference.

Clerks fear consequences for violations

Several clerks said they were particularly concerned about the consequences that they and their local governments could face as part of this proposal.

Bill 401 makes clear that governments cannot impose prerequisites on voters or cause any sort of disparities “between a protected class and other members of the electorate” in how votes are cast. And the bills introduce a number of new requirements for announcing changes to precinct boundaries, polling places, and other things that could affect voters.

The law allows voters to sue municipalities for alleged violations of the law. Such suits, if they’re not resolved independently, could also open communities up to mandates requiring explicit state or court approval for local changes, such as new district lines, polling places, or methods of elections — all with the goal of protecting voters, particularly those from protected classes.

Such “preclearance” requirements were central to the Voting Rights Act in areas with a history of discriminatory voting practices, until the Supreme Court dismantled those protections in its 2013 Shelby v. Holder decision.

As written, the requirements in the Michigan Voting Rights Act could ultimately place a heavy burden on clerks, said Melanie Ryska, Sterling Heights city clerk and president of the municipal clerks group. The goal is to hold so-called bad actors accountable, she said, but the way the bill is written also allows for consequences against clerks for things out of their control, including voter behavior.

“In a time when clerks are leaving the profession due to the overwhelming demands of new processes, technological challenges, public scrutiny and shifts in election law, why are we complicating their ability to do their jobs?” Ryska wrote in an email to Votebeat, noting that clerks are still contending with changes approved by voters in 2018 and 2022, like automatic voter registration and early in-person voting.

“Why engage in a ‘gotcha game’ that penalizes well-meaning clerks?” Ryska wrote. “If there are indeed ‘bad actors,’ why aren’t we focusing on addressing those specific issues instead of placing additional burdens on to everyone?”

Ryska also flagged a concern over the legislation’s demand for a “voting and elections database” at a public university in the state, which would serve as a data hub and training ground for election administration. Ryska said that clerks “generally support” such a data institute, “provided it does not impose additional burdens on already strained clerks’ offices.”

Siegrist said that the municipal clerks association was looking forward to working with House lawmakers to try to clean up some of the most concerning pieces of the legislation. Clerks largely want to support the bills, particularly as the federal Voting Rights Act has been “watered down,” he said, but they are concerned about potential pressures on local election officials who “are really trying their hardest to actually deliver the elections.”

“We’re going to try to remove the provisions put in place that assume the worst of local election officials,” he said. “We can’t get behind bills that are going to put in penalties for clerks who just make honest mistakes.”

Byrum, the Ingham County clerk, said she recognized the added burdens the MVRA would place on local and county clerks, especially given all the new requirements for the 2024 presidential election. “But as a whole, I believe the package of bills will be a positive thing for our voters,” she said, “and that’s why I personally support it.”

Other legislative changes

The bill has drawn criticism from legislators, too, largely along partisan lines.

Sen. Jim Runestad, a Republican from White Lake, said he was worried about the voting data hub, which he believes would present privacy concerns, despite provisions in the legislation requiring strict cybersecurity measures.

Runestad also criticized Bill 404, which, in addition to allowing curbside voting to those who cannot physically enter a polling place, would allow people to provide “food, warmth or other necessities” to voters inside or outside of a polling place. The measure seeks to protect a form of aid to voters that Georgia outlawed outside polling places.

Under Michigan’s legislation, clerks would have discretion on who could provide such aid, and those people could not interfere with the voting process in any way. But Senate Democrats rejected proposed changes that would ban those people from being inside the polling place.

“I believe this conflicts with the sanctity of the voting place,” Runestad said. “Is it like, I can go in there, hand out hot dogs and pops to people and say, ‘This is Jim Runestad,’ inside the voting polling location?”

Current electioneering law, he noted, bans people from campaigning within 100 feet of a polling place.

Sen. Ruth Johnson, a Republican representing Holly and a former Michigan Secretary of State, said in a news release that there was “no good justification” that would allow distribution of food to voters to outweigh potential privacy concerns as well as concerns about influence.

“The voting process is a private opportunity for citizens to express their preferences without undue influence or distraction,” Johnson said in her statement.

Hayley Harding is a reporter for Votebeat based in Michigan. Contact Hayley at hharding@votebeat.org.

Texas lawmakers signal push to require proof of citizenship from voters

2024-10-17T01:18:33+00:00

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

This article is co-published with ProPublica, a nonprofit newsroom that investigates abuses of power, and with The Texas Tribune, a nonprofit and nonpartisan newsroom that engages with Texans. Sign up to receive ProPublica’s biggest stories here and The Texas Tribune’s newsletters here.

Texas lawmakers Wednesday signaled plans to consider a new law requiring proof of citizenship to register to vote, though even one of the strongest supporters of such legislation acknowledged instances of noncitizens voting are rare.

During a Senate State Affairs committee hearing, lawmakers expressed interest in reviving legislation modeled on a proof of citizenship requirement in Arizona, currently the only state with such a requirement in force.

Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick called the hearing on noncitizen voting after Gov. Greg Abbott issued a press release boasting that the state had removed more than potential 6,500 noncitizens from its voter rolls. An investigation by ProPublica, The Texas Tribune and Votebeat published this week found the governor’s figure was likely inflated and, in some cases, wrong.

The secretary of state’s office confirmed the news organization’s reporting during the hearing Wednesday after state Sen. Judith Zaffirini, a Democrat, cited the article’s findings and pressed Christina Adkins, the state elections division director.

The news organizations found that between September 2021 and August 2024, counties removed 581 people from the rolls on the grounds that they were noncitizens, according to a report the secretary of state gave Abbott. The governor’s news release combined that figure with a separate number of people who were removed from the rolls after failing to respond to letters alerting them to questions about their citizenship and initially said more than 6,500 noncitizens had been removed. But U.S. citizens who simply never received or responded to such letters are almost certainly included in the governor’s numbers.

In addition, the news organizations have so far found at least 10 U.S. citizens in three Texas counties who were incorrectly labeled as noncitizens or removed from the rolls because they did not respond to a notice with questions about their citizenship. The news organizations’ previous story reported finding nine citizens; reporters have since confirmed another.

“So the actual number goes back to 581 that have been identified as noncitizens?” Zaffirini said.

“I would say 581 is the number we know,” said Adkins also acknowledged that failure to respond to a notice does not mean a person is not a U.S. citizen.

After the hearing, Zaffirini said she is concerned that the intense focus on making sure noncitizens aren’t on the voter rolls “will be interpreted as voter intimidation in some cases,” even if it’s not intended that way.

Nonetheless, multiple lawmakers on the committee, which is comprised of nine Republicans and three Democrats, said they believe the state needs to adopt requirements similar to Arizona’s 2004 law. Only six committee members attended all or part of Wednesday’s hearing, which covered multiple topics. Zaffirini was the only Democrat there.

Hughes proposed legislation last year that would require people to show proof of citizenship before they can vote, but it failed to move forward. On Wednesday he said he intends to file it again next session.

“We need to get it done,” Hughes said.

Republicans around the country have repeatedly raised unsubstantiated concerns about noncitizen voting in recent weeks, assertions that former President Donald Trump and his party are using to cast doubt on the integrity of the upcoming November election.

In Texas, Attorney General Ken Paxton has pressed Secretary of State Jane Nelson to demand the federal government’s assistance in identifying potential noncitizens on the rolls. On Wednesday, he and 15 other attorneys general sent a letter to U.S. Department of Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas, saying the agency had failed to respond quickly and helpfully enough to their requests for assistance.

Ken Cuccinelli, a former acting director of the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services and former acting deputy secretary of DHS, told lawmakers at the hearing that obtaining information about noncitizens will be costly and unreliable, and said a USCIS database is “not particularly well designed” or easy to use.

But the database is “the only database of noncitizens present in the United States that we have,” he said, adding, “there is no database of who’s a citizen.”

U.S. CIS has been going back and forth with officials in several states, including Texas, over what it can provide.

Sen. Paul Bettencourt, a Houston Republican, acknowledged such instances of noncitizens voting are rare but recalled his experience removing some from the rolls when he was voter registrar in Harris County more than 20 years ago.

“Now, small numbers, but actually things that have occurred,” he said. “So when we’re talking about this, it’s important to know that there are actually instances.”

States should be allowed to use Social Security data to determine citizenship, Bettencourt said in an interview after Wednesday’s hearing. The data would not encompass every person living in the United States –– not everyone has a Social Security number –– but would cover most people, he said.

Adopting a system like Arizona’s would be a major shift for Texas, and would bring new administrative burdens.

Under federal law, all U.S. voters must attest to their citizenship to register, but do not need to prove it. In 2014, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that Arizona must allow residents who do not provide proof to vote in federal elections. That means the state has a unique bifurcated system, with a separate “federal only” list of around 40,000 people who can vote in federal elections, but not in state and local races.

But there have been glitches. Arizona officials discovered this summer that for decades, the state has been labeling some voters as having provided documents proving U.S. citizenship, when in fact they had never been asked to do so.

The error, affecting at least 218,000 longtime residents in the state, came about because the Motor Vehicle Division had incorrectly labeled the type of driver’s license the voters had, and county recorders were relying on that driver’s license information to verify citizenship when someone registered to vote. The Arizona Supreme Court ruled last month that the voters will not need to provide the proof of citizenship before November’s election, although they will need to before the next election.

Cuccinelli, who now is chairman of the conservative Election Transparency Initiative, praised the Arizona bifurcated system.

“There are bad actors. They’re the minority, but you can zero in on them a whole lot easier if they’re only on your smaller list,” he said.

Natalia Contreras covers election administration and voting access for Votebeat in partnership with the Texas Tribune. Contact Natalia at ncontreras@votebeat.org.

Vianna Davila is an investigative reporter with ProPublica and The Texas Tribune. Contact her at vianna.davila@propublica.org.

Lexi Churchill, ProPublica and James Barragán, The Texas Tribune, and Jen Fifield, Votebeat, contributed to this story.

Judge strikes down strict voter assistance rules in Texas’ 2021 rewrite of election laws

2024-10-12T02:33:33+00:00

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

Certain provisions of Texas’ sweeping 2021 voting law that restrict voter assistance violate the federal Voting Rights Act and cannot be enforced, a federal judge in Texas ruled Friday.

Among the rules struck down by U.S. District Judge Xavier Rodriguez was a ban on compensation for anyone who assists a voter and a requirement for anyone who assists a voter to sign an oath under penalty of perjury that the voter qualifies to receive help.

Rodriguez also blocked provisions that require assisters to make certain disclosures about their relationship to the voter they are helping and a provision that restricts voter assistance given during door-to-door voter outreach operations.

Rodriguez based his decision on the section of the 1965 federal Voting Rights Act that guarantees voters with disabilities or literacy limitations the right to receive assistance from whoever they choose.

“This ruling will be most impactful for voters with disabilities, voters who have limited English proficiency, voters with literacy issues and the people who assist them,” said Sean Morales-Doyle, voting rights program director at the Brennan Center for Justice.

Although the judge has blocked any type of prosecution under these provisions, the rules and instructions on forms about requiring voter assisters from signing an oath are technically still in place for the upcoming Nov. 5 presidential election, because it is too close to the election to change the forms themselves.

“It’s a shame that we’re now going to go through yet another election where people continue to have their rights violated as a result of what the Texas Legislature did,” Morales-Doyle said. “But this is still a big win for voters in Texas.”

Last year, the state argued the provisions did not violate the Voting Rights Act and that it “permits state-law restrictions on who may serve as an assistor beyond the limitations provided in federal law.”

The sweeping voting law dubbed Senate Bill 1 — which changed how some Texans vote and how election officials administer elections — was championed by Texas Republican legislators in 2021. Its passage led to a dramatic fight with Texas Democratic lawmakers, who broke quorum in an attempt to prevent the law from moving forward. Democrats in Texas and nationwide accused Republicans of basing the new rules on unfounded claims of widespread voter fraud in the November 2020 election.

Soon after the bill was signed by Gov. Gregg Abbott, more than 20 state and national organizations filed suit, seeking to overturn the new law. The lawsuits were consolidated into this case. The groups claimed provisions of the new law violate federal statutes, including the Voting Rights Act, the Americans With Disabilities Act, the Rehabilitation Act, and the U.S. Constitution.

In his Friday ruling, Rodriguez laid out a few scenarios that would put voters at risk under the law’s voter assistance provisions:

“A man helps his blind wife of 20 years cast her ballot at the polls without first securing a representation from her that she is ‘eligible for assistance.’ Even if he completes her ballot according to her exact instructions, he faces up to two years in prison and a fine of up to $10,000,” he noted.

“While meeting with a client about his tax return, a staff member for a community organization that provides free income tax services agrees to help translate the man’s mail-in ballot,” Rodriguez wrote. “The client fills out his own ballot, with accurate translation assistance from the staff member. Even though the ballot reflects the client’s wishes, the staff member faces up to two years in prison, she and her employer may be fined up to $10,000, and the client’s ballot may not be counted.”

The two-month trial began in September 2023. Lawyers later presented closing arguments in February 2024.

Plaintiffs challenged dozens of provisions, including a ban on 24-hour and drive-through voting; a prohibition stopping election officials from distributing mail-in ballot applications to voters who did not request them and provisions that expand poll watchers’ access, among others. Rodriguez has yet to rule on the remainder of those. Phase two of the trial, over whether the law’s intent was to discriminate against voters of color, is still making its way through the courts, which won’t begin until Rodriguez rules on all the remaining challenges to the provisions of the law in its current phase.

Plaintiffs said these provisions of the law made it harder for voters of color, voters with disabilities, and voters who don’t speak English to cast ballots.

Additionally, plaintiffs said the law made it more difficult for some voting rights advocacy organizations, forcing them to divert resources away from other programs to expand voter education efforts.

For its part, the state claimed Senate Bill 1 was passed to resolve “irregularities during the 2020 election caused by the COVID-19 pandemic,” singling out the decision by Harris County, the state’s most populous, to offer drive-through voting, and several issues with Harris County’s election.

The list of plaintiffs includes several organizations advocating for Latino, Black, and Asian-American voters, including the League of United Latin American Citizens, or LULAC and OCA–Asian Pacific American Advocates, as well as groups advocating for voters with disabilities.

To support their claims, the parties relied on 52 witnesses during the trial including county election administrators from across the state, voters, lawmakers, representatives of the Texas secretary of state, and experts in political science and voting rights.

The judge had previously struck down other key provisions.

For example, the legislation created new requirements for Texans who qualify to vote by mail. They are now required to provide either a driver’s license number or the last four digits of their Social Security number on their absentee ballot application and the envelope used to return their completed ballot, whichever matches the number the state has in its voter registration file. Last year, Judge Rodriguez said that provision is illegal, though it remains in effect pending an appeal making its way through the courts.

Earlier this month, Rodriguez blocked a provision that effectively criminalized door-to-door canvassing for ballot initiatives.

Natalia Contreras covers election administration and voting access for Votebeat in partnership with the Texas Tribune. Contact Natalia at ncontreras@votebeat.org

Harris County voter outreach proposal sparks another fight with Texas Republicans

2024-08-29T16:19:20+00:00

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

This article has been updated to clarify comments made by state Sen. Paul Bettencourt in both a published statement and an interview with Votebeat and The Texas Tribune.

Texas Republicans are clashing again with the state’s most populous county over voting. This time, they’re criticizing Harris County’s plan for outreach to eligible but unregistered voters ahead of the registration deadline.

County commissioners were set to consider the proposed outreach effort at a meeting Tuesday. But they took it off the agenda without explanation after Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick and state Sen. Paul Bettencourt, a Harris County Republican, put out a statement describing the proposal as an “attempt to bypass” a law passed last year restructuring the county’s elections. Bettencourt’s statment claimed without evidence that the plan would “have a very high probability of registering non-citizens to vote.”

In an interview, Bettencourt said he objects to the county commissioners proposing the outreach after the Legislature passed a law last year eliminating the county’s election administrator position and assigning all election duties to the county clerk and tax assessor-collector.

“You should not have commissioners court instructing the voter registrar to do anything. That’s not their role,” Bettencourt told Votebeat, adding that under the new law, “they do not have any authority there.”

Texas law bars election officials from mailing out unsolicited mail-in ballot applications — which is not part of the Harris County proposal. Mailing out unsolicited voter registration applications, which is part of the Harris County plan, is not against the law, but Bettencourt told Votebeat he’s asking the Texas Attorney General’s Office whether it should also be prohibited.

The Harris County proposal – first discussed at a commissioners court meeting on Aug. 6 — had multiple parts.

Commissioner Rodney Ellis, who brought up the item for discussion, aimed to use county data to identify areas where eligible but unregistered potential voters live, then contact them by text message and also mail them voter registration applications.

According to the proposal initially on the agenda for Tuesday’s meeting, the county administrator, the county attorney, and the tax assessor-collector departments would have been responsible for working together to carry out the plan.

Ellis later told Votebeat he pulled the proposal to improve it, especially “in the effective use of county resources to increase voter registration.” Ellis added that his office will continue to work with the tax assessor’s office “to develop a successful plan for greater registration and participation.”

When the item was first brought up on Aug. 6, Tom Ramsey, the sole Republican commissioner, said he opposed what he described as “a last-minute attempt to do voter outreach.” He said the tax assessor’s office should be the only county agency handling anything to do with voter registration.

“We spent a lot of effort in the Legislature to return responsibilities of voter registration and elections back to the county clerk and the tax assessor collector,” Ramsey said. “It appears to me we’re trying to reinvent a revamped elections administrator through the county administrator’s office.”

Harris County elections have been under scrutiny

The 2023 law restructuring the way elections are administered in Harris County was the result of a long series of skirmishes between the Republican-dominated Legislature and the heavily Democratic county over its elections, which have a history of problems.

In addition to turning election duties over to the county clerk’s office and voter registration duties to the county tax assessor-collector, another bill authored by Bettencourt gave the secretary of state authority to investigate election “irregularities” after complaints are filed, but only in counties with more than 4 million people — that is, only Harris County.

Last week, the Secretary of State’s Office released an audit critical of the county’s failures to follow state-mandated rules and other procedures during its 2021 and 2022 elections, but noted that current officials, who didn’t oversee those elections, have worked to fix the problems. The state will send election inspectors to Harris County in November, the office said.

In a social media post Monday, Bettencourt said Harris County’s planned voter outreach would “result in very high probability of registering non-citizens to vote,” a claim he also made in his statement with Patrick. When asked if he had data to support the claim, Bettencourt directed Votebeat to recent numbers released by Gov. Greg Abbott, also a Republican.

Abbott’s numbers said 6,500 people identified as potential noncitizens were among the million people removed from the state’s voter rolls over a nearly three-year period. Voting rights groups are concerned, however, that the state incorrectly removed eligible voters. Bettencourt said sending out unsolicited voter registration applications creates more opportunities for people to make errors.

Update, Aug 29, 2024: Bettencourt also said in an interview his evidence that noncitizens would be very likely to register to vote through the county’s mailing was based on his experience as Harris County’s tax assessor-collector and registrar in 1998-2008, when he found 35 noncitizens who had tried to register to vote or were already on the voter rolls, whose registration and applications he canceled and rejected.

If voter registrations are mailed out, he said, “there’s no way for the tax office to say, ‘Oh, look, you’re not a citizen. You shouldn’t be doing this.’ That’s part of the problem,” he said.

There are important checks in the system, though. When voter registrars receive voter registration applications, they send them to the Texas Secretary of State’s Office, where they are checked for eligibility against Department of Public Safety and Social Security Administration data. In addition, local voter registrars work with their county district attorney’s office to check citizenship status using responses from jury summons questionnaires.

Outreach effort approved in Travis County

For his part, Ramsey said on social media that the Harris County proposal was “a scheme to adversely affect voter outcome in the November election.” Ramsey did not respond to a request for comment on how the program would affect election outcomes.

In Travis County, another Democratic stronghold, officials have approved a program to identify new county residents who are eligible to vote but have not yet registered. Those voters will receive information on how to register and a voter registration application. The campaign does not include sending out text messages as the Harris County plan would. Bruce Elfant, the county’s tax assessor-collector told Votebeat that the program has not had any pushback from any state Republicans.

Bettencourt said he found out about the Travis County program only this week and does not know details of how it works.

Republican lawmakers have targeted Harris County efforts to promote voter registration and voter participation before. In 2020, during the COVID-19 pandemic, the county sent out absentee mail-in ballot applications to eligible voters and provided 24-hour drive-thru voting. The following year, Republicans passed an overhaul of election laws that banned both of those activities in the state.

A ruling by a federal judge is pending on whether those changes — enacted through Senate Bill 1 — discriminate against people of color in Texas by making it harder for them to vote.

Natalia Contreras covers election administration and voting access for Votebeat in partnership with the Texas Tribune. Contact Natalia at ncontreras@votebeat.org.

Abbott says a million names have been deleted from Texas voter rolls. What does that number mean?

2024-08-27T20:35:31+00:00

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

This story was reported in partnership with The Texas Tribune, a member-supported, nonpartisan newsroom informing and engaging Texans on state politics and policy.

Update, Aug. 28: In response to Abbott’s press release, a coalition of watchdog and voting rights groups in a letter Wednesday asked Texas Secretary of State Jane Nelson whether Texas has been removing voters from its rolls within the 90-day period before an election, which would be a violation of federal law.

The groups, which include ACLU, Texas Civil Rights Project, and the Campaign Legal Center said some of the 6,500 potential noncitizens Abbott highlighted in his press release could have been mistakenly flagged. “We are alarmed by the large number of voters removed on this basis, indicating that eligible Texas voters have likely been erroneously identified as potential noncitizens and purged from the rolls,” they said in the letter, which also requested related documents from the Secretary of State’s Office.

Texas Gov. Greg Abbott announced on Monday that the state has removed roughly a million people from its voter rolls since he signed a legislative overhaul of election laws in 2021.

“Illegal voting in Texas will never be tolerated. We will continue to actively safeguard Texans’ sacred right to vote while also aggressively protecting our elections from illegal voting,” he said.

However, election experts point out that both federal and state law already required voter roll maintenance, and the governor’s framing of this routine process as a protection against illegal voting could be used to undermine trust in elections. The National Voter Registration Act of 1993 already governs how states should keep their registration rolls accurate and up-to-date, and also includes protections to avoid the inadvertent removal of properly registered voters.

“Year after year, people are taken off the voting rolls for all manner of innocuous reasons,” said Sarah Xiyi Chen, an attorney at the Texas Civil Rights Project.

Neither the governor nor the Secretary of State’s Office responded to requests for comment.

Removal of ‘noncitizens’ raises questions

The majority of voters removed from the rolls were taken off because they died, failed to respond to notices from election officials, or moved out of Texas. Abbott’s press release also said more than 6,000 voters were removed after being convicted of a felony.

The total Abbott cited includes more than 463,000 who were taken off after being placed on what is known as the suspense list. Such voters are removed after the voter registrar receives information that they have moved. If the voter does not update their information and does not vote for two election cycles, they’re then removed from the rolls.

In addition, the governor stressed that more than 6,500 “noncitizens” who shouldn’t have been registered were removed, and approximately 1,930 of those had a voting history.

Voter watchdogs such as Alice Clapman, senior counsel at the Brennan Center’s Voting Rights Program, said they want to know more about those voters, because Texas has wrongly flagged people as noncitizens before.

Erroneously flagging legal voters as noncitizens can occur when outdated information is obtained from naturalized citizens or if someone mistakenly checks the wrong box at the DMV, Clapman said.

In 2019, Texas officials flagged 95,000 voters whom they identified as “noncitizens” and accused broadly of voter fraud. After review, it turned out that many of the people identified on the rolls were naturalized citizens. The scandal resulted in the secretary of state resigning. The state abandoned the effort after numerous lawsuits, which resulted in the state setting new guidelines for future voter roll clean-ups.

ACLU of Texas attorney Ashley Harris points to the 2019 incident as an example of the state’s lack of transparency about how it collects this data.

“It’s difficult to tell what these numbers actually mean, and the state hasn’t pointed to anyone who actually voted as a noncitizen, and they’ve provided data without context,” Harris said.

There has been no evidence of widespread noncitizen voting in federal elections, even as Republicans across the county — including former President Donald Trump — have ramped up unproven claims.

Clapman also said it’s unlikely that a noncitizen would risk deportation or other penalties to cast a single vote.

“The very idea is so illogical,” Clapman said. “It’s irresponsible for politicians and others to be fanning the flames of misinformation out there and undermining trust in elections.”

Officials say Texas has ‘strong, clean voter rolls’

County voter registrars conduct extensive voter roll maintenance on a daily basis. As they receive and process applications, eligibility status is verified by the Texas secretary of state. But locally, one other way election officials check whether a voter is a U.S. citizen is through the local district attorney’s offices.

Across the state, those offices use their county voter rolls to send out jury summons questionnaires. Voters who respond to those surveys by indicating they’re not U.S. citizens are not eligible to participate in a jury. That information is also used by the voter registrar’s office to remove noncitizens from the rolls.

At a state House of Representatives committee hearing on elections Monday, officials with the Texas Secretary of State’s Office addressed how the state confirms that voters who register are U.S. citizens and eligible to cast a ballot.

Christina Adkins, the agency’s elections division director, said that since 2021, the Texas Department of Public Safety on a weekly basis has provided data to the secretary of state from people who have obtained a state ID or driver’s license and identified as a noncitizen while doing so. Through that process they’re required to show DPS documentation of lawful presence in the United States, such as a permanent resident card — known as a green card — or an immigrant visa.

That data is compared with the voter rolls and sent to county voter registrars. In addition, election officials use information provided by volunteer deputy registrars — appointed by the county to help people register to vote — to check whether a voter registered at their U.S. naturalization ceremony.

If a voter provides the last four digits of their Social Security number on their voter registration application, the state also checks that the person on the application is who they say they are by matching first name, last name, and date of birth against data from the Social Security Administration.

Adkins emphasized the state has “strong, clean voter rolls” and that the state has been looking for ways to improve voter roll maintenance and eligibility verification practices. “For many, many, many years now, Texas has been on the forefront of making sure that we have the right data sets, that they are properly and securely validated,” she said.

The state is also looking into working with the Texas Department of Criminal Justice to obtain data on Texans with felony convictions, who may be on probation or parole.

“Identifying these individuals that are ineligible doesn’t just make for a strong voter registration list, it also prevents individuals from potentially making mistakes that could impact them negatively, too,” Adkins said.

Last week, Attorney General Ken Paxton opened an investigation into “reports that organizations operating in Texas maybe unlawfully registering noncitizens to vote,” after a Fox News host made an unsubstantiated claim on social media that migrants were registering to vote outside a driver’s license facility near Fort Worth.

Both the county election administrator and Republican Party chair said they had investigated the claims and found no evidence.

The law Abbott signed in 2021 set new rules and penalties for voter assistance, made it a felony for local officials to proactively distribute applications for mail-in ballots, banned local initiatives to expand voting hours and drive through voters, and gave partisan poll watchers increased autonomy inside polling places, among other things.

Natalia Contreras covers election administration and voting access for Votebeat in partnership with the Texas Tribune. Contact Natalia at ncontreras@votebeat.org.

Supreme Court ruling in Arizona citizenship-proof case won’t be the end of it

2024-08-26T09:00:00+00:00

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

In a closely watched case this week, the U.S. Supreme Court rejected most of a Republican request that would have disenfranchised more than 40,000 Arizona voters who didn’t provide documented proof of citizenship when they registered and would have prevented them from voting in November’s presidential election.

But there’s more to come and more at stake. The Supreme Court ruled on an emergency request, but the complex case could yet upend voting rights precedent as it moves back through the lower courts.

Republicans are making a broad argument in their effort to void the registrations. They contend that Congress largely cannot regulate presidential elections, authority that the U.S. Justice Department said has been established for more than a century. Lawyers opposing that argument say they are prepared for the case to work its way back to the Supreme Court. The next scheduled step in the case is arguments before the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals next month.

“The likelihood of getting a lower court to bite on something like that, that’s basically foreclosed by precedent, is very low,” said Danielle Lang, a senior director of voting rights for the Campaign Legal Center who is representing several parties opposing the Republican request. “From the beginning, they were telegraphing their strategy, and it was a Supreme Court strategy.”

That means the question of whether Congress can regulate presidential elections — as well as whether Arizona can place the new restrictions on voters without the documented proof of citizenship — could wind up back before the Supreme Court, albeit after the November election.

Arizona’s unique voting laws require documented proof of U.S. citizenship to vote in state and local elections. But federal law allows voters without such proof to cast ballots in federal races like president and Congress. It requires only that voters attest, under penalty of perjury, that they are citizens and eligible to vote. So since 2013, thanks to an earlier Supreme Court ruling, Arizona has had a split system, placing voters who didn’t supply proof of citizenship on a “federal only” list, which now numbers around 41,000.

A Votebeat analysis of the 32,000 voters who are on the federal-only list as of last year found that they’re more likely to be young residents and people living on or around college campuses. Other research has found that newly naturalized voters are also more likely to be on the federal-only list.

Republicans say the different documentation requirements for federal elections could allow noncitizens to vote illegally, an issue they’ve been increasingly vocal about, even though such cases are extraordinarily rare.

In 2022, Arizona Republicans enacted laws restricting how federal-only voters could participate in elections, and also required frequent voter citizenship checks. Following challenges from voting rights groups, the U.S. District Court of Arizona ruled in May that substantial portions of the 2022 statutes violate federal laws, though it allowed the state to enforce portions of the law requiring more citizenship checks. Republican legislative leaders and the state Republican Party then asked the appeals court to temporarily suspend parts of that ruling.

The result of that request has been a legal back-and-forth in recent weeks, specifically over the forms that voters use to register. First a federal appeals court panel issued a temporary ruling that said voters could still register as federal-only voters, without citizenship proof, as long as they used a federal registration form, instead of the far more commonly used state form. Then another panel of judges vacated that ruling, briefly allowing residents to again register as federal-only voters with the state form.

With the Supreme Court’s order Thursday, Arizona residents without citizenship proof again will have their registrations rejected unless they use the federal form. The justices rejected Republicans’ request to halt other parts of the lower court decision on an emergency basis.

Arizona Secretary of State Adrian Fontes, a Democrat, had told the court that siding with Republicans and changing the rules this close to the elections could create chaos.

As is normal for an emergency order, the justices did not lay out the reasoning behind their decision. Seven justices, though, did disclose their position on the Republicans’ request. Justices Samuel Alito, Neil Gorsuch, and Clarence Thomas would have granted the emergency stay in full — allowing the tighter restrictions on the federal-only voters. Justices Amy Coney Barrett, Elena Kagan, Ketanji Brown Jackson, and Sonia Sotomayor would have denied it in full. The order didn’t disclose positions taken by Chief Justice John Roberts or Justice Brett Kavanaugh, but they presumably voted in favor of the partial stay, since four justices were on the record as preferring to deny it.

Lang, from the Campaign Legal Center, cautioned against reading too much into the justices’ positions on an emergency stay request, especially since concern about upending the law this close to November’s election might have weighed heavily on the court. As it is, she said, she believes that the so-called Purcell Principle, which calls for not changing election rules close to an election, should argue against even the limited order endorsed by a majority of the justices.

“I don’t think we can take anything for given on where the justices are on the merits,” she said. “We just have to make our best case.”

Votebeat Arizona reporter Jen Fifield contributed.

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.

Meanwhile, at the Democratic convention …

Democrats, at least, are clearly signaling their belief that Congress can regulate all federal elections.

During Vice President Kamala Harris’ speech Thursday accepting the presidential nomination, she reminded Democrats that they still have a pair of ambitious voting rights bills sitting on a shelf waiting for a chance at passage. Ticking through a list of fundamental freedoms at stake in November, she stopped to note: “With this election, we finally have the opportunity to pass the John Lewis Voting Rights Act and the Freedom to Vote Act.”

The two bills have been around for a while in different forms and faced decent prospects in 2021 and 2022, when Democrats briefly controlled both chambers of Congress. The obstacles to passage in the Senate were two members of their own party, Joe Manchin of West Virginia and Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona, who wouldn’t agree to alter filibuster rules to allow Democrats to try to pass the measures on a majority vote. Both senators now are on their way out.

The Freedom to Vote Act (previously known as the For the People Act, or HR1) is a massive legislative package that would:

Require expanded voting options in every state, particularly no-excuse vote by mail and in-person early voting;
Set national standards for voter registration opportunities, accommodations for voter with disabilities, and voter ID laws;
Instill legal and process protections for election officials and ballot security;
Aim to prevent partisan gerrymandering; and
Reform campaign finance laws.

The John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act primarily would shore up the 1965 Voting Rights Act to provide more protections against discriminatory voting rules, in response to the Supreme Court’s nullifying of key provisions in 2013. The bill would restore a formula for requiring certain local jurisdictions to get Justice Department permission — known as preclearance — before making changes to voting rules or election districts.

Harris described the election as an “opportunity” for those bills, because their fate depends entirely on who controls Congress in 2025. If Democrats retake the House and hold the Senate in November (which is a big if), they then could craft a strategy to pass the bills. But there are no guarantees.

As Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer emphasized in optimistic interviews at the convention, Senate Democrats would still have to overcome the filibuster. With Manchin and Sinema gone, the path forward would depend on the Senate’s new arrivals. See Patrick Marley’s excellent reporting in the Washington Post about the opposition to the bills — conservatives see them as a federal intrusion — and the practical concerns that would likely make passing and implementing the laws difficult for Democrats.

— Chad Lorenz

Chad Lorenz is Votebeat’s editor in chief and is based in Denver. Contact Chad at clorenz@votebeat.org.

Vice president candidates present stark contrast on voting issues

2024-08-06T19:24:59+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.

The selection Tuesday of Tim Walz, governor of Minnesota, as Kamala Harris’ vice presidential running mate spotlights a clear contrast with JD Vance, his counterpart on Donald Trump’s ticket, on the issue of voting.

As governor, Walz has staked out a lengthy policy record on voting and election issues, including an expansion of voting rights. Vance has had fewer opportunities to affect voting policy as a senator, but his statements on the subject over the last four years, including false claims about voter fraud, offer insight into his views.

Here’s a look at the positions the two running mates have taken:

Tim Walz: Signed legislation to expand voting options

After 12 years representing Minnesota in the U.S. House, Walz was elected governor in 2018 and reelected in 2022, with winning margins of 11 and 8 points, respectively. Since that time, he has signed multiple voting-related bills, and Minnesota has expanded voting access significantly.

Most of the bills were passed last year under a fully Democratic-led legislature, and took effect this year. Most notably, Walz signed the sweeping Democracy for the People Act in May 2023. It overhauled voting processes in a state that was already the highest in the nation for voter turnout. The legislation introduced automatic voter registration, allowed 16- and 17-year-olds to register in advance to vote, expanded vote by mail, and increased the number of languages in which voting materials were printed.

The next month, he signed legislation that restored voting rights to more than 50,000 Minnesotans on parole with a felony conviction. It amounted to the largest change in voter eligibility in the state in more than 50 years.

This year, Walz signed an omnibus election bill supporters referred to as the Minnesota Voting Rights Act, as it was proposed in response to the U.S. Supreme Court’s rollback of protections under the federal 1965 Voting Rights Act. It allows voters to challenge unfair electoral systems in court and ends prison gerrymandering, so that people who are in state or federal prison are counted for representation based on where they’re from, not where they are incarcerated.

“Today, we’re ensuring a strong democracy by prioritizing accessibility and voter protections,” Walz said in a release about the signing. “With this bill we are breaking barriers that stand in the way of voting, protecting fair democratic processes, and paving the way for Minnesota to continue to lead the nation in voter turnout.”

In July, he signed a bill making Minnesota the first state in the nation to pass sweeping regulations on election-related AI deep fakes.

JD Vance: Voter fraud claims, voting power for parents

Vance was elected to the U.S. Senate in November 2022. By then, he’d already come out swinging against progressive voting policies and making false claims about voter fraud. In response to a Democratic proposal to lower the voting age to 16, he proposed giving additional voting power to parents.

“If you don’t have as much of an investment in the future of this country, maybe you shouldn’t get nearly the same voice,” Vance said in July 2021, shortly after announcing his Senate candidacy, promoting an idea that parents should be able to cast ballots for their underage children.

“Let’s give votes to all the children in this country, and let’s give control over votes to the parents in this country,” he said.

That October, Vance told a reporter for The Vindicator — a local newspaper serving Ohio’s Youngstown area — that illegal voting happened on “a large-scale basis” in the 2020 election. In the same interview, Vance repeated proven misinformation about private election spending, saying Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg spent $420 million “buying up local boards of elections in battleground states of mostly Democratic areas” to “tilt” the vote in Joe Biden’s favor.

In 2022, Vance’s campaign ran a television ad that falsely claimed undocumented immigrants coming into the country are voting in elections. “Joe Biden’s open border is killing Ohioans with more illegal drugs and more Democrat voters pouring into this country,” Vance said in the ad.

Vance has been consistent in his support for those who stormed the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, and said in an interview with ABC News’ George Stephanopoulos in February that — had he been vice president overseeing Congress’s certification of the 2020 election — he would not have accepted the electoral votes some states submitted for Biden.

Instead, he said, he would have allowed multiple slates of electors to be presented and “the U.S. Congress should have fought over it from there. That is the legitimate way to deal with an election that a lot of folks, including me, think had a lot of problems in 2020.”

In a June interview, he told New York Times columnist Ross Douthat that Congress should have held an open debate breaking down Trump’s claims of voter fraud. “Do I think Joe Biden would still be president right now? Yeah, probably,” he said. “But at least we would have had a debate.”

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

What cost comparisons show about Michigan’s early in-person voting models

2024-06-21T14:52:19+00:00

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

The city of Ann Arbor recorded one of the state’s highest rates of early in-person voting in the February primary, and a Votebeat analysis shows it also succeeded in another important measure: It kept the cost per vote low.

Ann Arbor spent about $19 per early in-person vote, among the lowest of dozens of municipalities included in the analysis, which gauged only recurring costs like labor.

In Lansing, a city similar in size to Ann Arbor, the cost per vote was triple — around $58 — and the turnout rate much lower.

Meanwhile, in sparsely populated Ontonagon County in the Upper Peninsula, municipal election officials banded together under a countywide plan. Ontonagon County spent about $63 per vote, though that cost was spread among a dozen municipalities.

The Votebeat analysis examined different models of making early in-person voting available to determine which were most cost-efficient, and which led to the highest rate of early in-person voting. That’s the percentage of all voters in the primary who used the early in-person option.

The data did not reveal a clear, overarching pattern, but instead showed several trends that could offer insight for improving efficiency and boosting turnout.

The analysis also highlights the varied factors that can influence cost and turnout. Some are within clerks’ control, and others are not.

The February primary, notably, was a low-turnout election overall, with only 23% of registered voters casting ballots. And interest in early voting in some places hinged on unique factors, such as University of Michigan students in Ann Arbor with a strong interest in voting “uncommitted” in the Democratic primary and casting ballots before spring break, when election day fell.

In November, when far more people are voting, the cost per vote will probably go down. Meanwhile, as awareness of the early in-person option grows, more people will use it.

Clerks who spoke with Votebeat about the analysis stressed that voters by a wide margin approved a constitutional amendment guaranteeing an early in-person voting option, because they wanted to boost ballot access, regardless of cost.

It is “a mandated service that voters have told us they want,” said Ed Golembiewski, a former Washtenaw County deputy clerk.

“Implied within that is that they aren’t concerned that it costs more money, or the convenience of early voting offsets concerns about it costing more money,” Golembiewski added. “That said, we have a fiduciary responsibility to taxpayers, and election officials are efficient people by nature, so we’re certainly trying to provide this in a way that is cost effective, but also provides as much service to voters as we can.”

Among the analysis’ primary findings:

While clerks all say partnering with neighboring municipalities reduces costs, it does not always produce a high early in-person voting rate or improve voting access.
Among jurisdictions and municipalities that conducted their early voting themselves, the more populous ones typically had lower costs per vote than smaller municipalities.
The costs and turnout rate for different municipalities and jurisdictions were likely influenced by a range of factors, including the number of early in-person vote sites, and how vigorously each clerk’s office promoted the option.

How Votebeat analyzed early voting costs

The February presidential primary marked the first statewide election in which Michigan adopted the new rules required by Prop 2, a 2022 ballot initiative approved by 60% of voters that aimed to expand voting access.

Among other provisions, it mandated nine days of early in-person voting. Local clerks can implement that with one of three approaches: run their own early voting setup, cooperate with neighboring municipalities, or enter into a countywide arrangement, in which county election officials coordinate the process and strategically distribute polling places.

The analysis estimated the cost per vote based on the number of early in-person votes cast and the operating costs that clerks will incur each election, such as poll worker wages and some supplies. State law and the election manual require two election workers to be present at each location for 10 hours per day, though some were open for 12 hours.

Because this was Michigan’s first election with early in-person voting offered statewide, Votebeat’s analysis of cost per voter offers a unique data point without a comparable benchmark. Election day voting — given the higher volume of voters — will tend to be more cost efficient.

Nonetheless, the numbers provide an initial data point for officials to explore the most effective early voting approach in future elections.

The analysis did not factor in upfront costs for equipment like tabulators, computers, or software. The vast majority of those costs were covered by a one-time, $30 million allotment from the Legislature.

The Legislature’s allotment also covered much of municipalities’ poll worker costs for 2024, but it is unclear whether the state will continue that in 2025 and beyond.

Votebeat compared costs and turnout rates for a range of jurisdictions. Some were large, urban centers, like Lansing and Ann Arbor, each with electorates of more than 70,000 voters. Others were smaller communities that coordinated the early voting on their own, such as rural Bridgewater Township in Washtenaw County, and Harrison Township in Macomb County, each having fewer than 2,500 voters.

Some smaller communities banded together in a larger jurisdiction, as in Washtenaw County, or rural Ontonagon County. Some of Michigan’s largest jurisdictions, such as Detroit and Macomb County, did not respond to Votebeat’s requests to provide their cost numbers.

Joining forces vs. going it alone

Clerks say it is more cost effective for smaller municipalities to partner with neighboring communities to form larger early-voting jurisdictions, because the arrangement offers economies of scale, especially in administrative costs. Communities that share voting sites need fewer places than if each opened their own, which significantly lowers labor costs.

The benefits can be seen in Washtenaw County, where 23 municipalities joined forces under a jurisdiction that spent about $16.72 per vote, the second lowest cost in the analysis. By contrast, two municipalities in the county that opted not to join the countywide jurisdiction had much higher costs: $44 per vote in Ypsilanti Township, and $86 in Bridgewater Township.

Bridgewater, though, did see a relatively high rate of early in-person voting, suggesting that proximity to an early voting site is helpful, if costly, for small municipalities. Milan, which spent $73 per voter, saw a similar effect.

In Ingham County, which includes much of Lansing, most municipalities chose to go it alone. It would have been more cost efficient for many of the smaller townships and cities to work together, said Ingham County Clerk Barb Byrum. Such partnerships could save hundreds of thousands of dollars statewide, she added.

“I’m glad to see some of them partner up, but I wish more of them would,” Byrum said.

However, the partnerships may not improve access. In Ingham County, three municipalities worked together: Vevay Township, Onondaga Township, and Aurelius Township. For Byrum, who lives in that area, that meant driving at least 15 minutes to her early-vote location, which was farther than her local township hall where the early in-person vote would have happened had the township run its own site.

“Requiring a 15-minute drive did not make it more accessible,” she added.

One factor influencing how clerks decide to operate is whether they are full time. Many in smaller communities are not, and that forces them to work as part of a larger jurisdiction. Ontonagon County consolidated its early voting because of that challenge, said McMillan Township Clerk Kay Richter.

Even though the partnership was designed to limit costs, Richter didn’t think the result was worth it. The county served 71 early voters, at a cost of $63 per vote.

“It was a total waste of time, energy, and money to run an EV site in Ontonagon County,” Richter said. “I highly doubt that it increased total voter turnout for the primary. In my opinion, we paid people to sit and do almost nothing for nine days.”

In Ann Arbor, the high turnout rate highlights how decisions made by clerks can boost turnout while keeping the cost per vote relatively low. The city offered six in-person voting sites, which pushed its labor costs up to about $50,000, City Clerk Jacqueline Beaudry said.

The city partnered with the University of Michigan and Ann Arbor District Library, and located voting sites where there is a high volume of public traffic, including in the mornings and evenings, when people typically vote.

“A large part of our success was location, and our plan was ‘What is best for our voters?’” Beaudry said. “We were all around the community at different times, so whatever worked best for the voter, we were there for them.”

Ann Arbor’s turnout may also have benefited from the timing of U-M’s spring break, which occurred during the week of the Feb. 27 election. Many students were not going to be on campus on that day, which likely boosted participation in early voting. The interest among some U-M students to cast a ballot for “uncommitted” as a protest vote against President Joe Biden’s policy in the Israel-Hamas war may have also factored into the high tally.

By contrast, East Lansing, home to Michigan State University, had a relatively low early-voting turnout and the highest cost in Votebeat’s analysis, at about $119 per vote. MSU’s spring break was at the same time as U-M’s, and the city offered an early in-person voting site on campus. East Lansing City Clerk Marie Wicks did not respond to a request for comment.

Byrum, the Ingham County clerk, said clerks will figure out how to balance cost efficiency and boost access as they get more experience with the early in-person voting option, and voters become aware of it.

“We have to figure out a way to make sure that an early vote site is accessible to voters while keeping in mind personnel restraints on our smaller townships and cities,” she said. “And we need to figure out which agreements best serve our voters.”

Votebeat contributor Tom Perkins is a freelance reporter in Hamtramck, Michigan.

Texas conservatives want to end countywide voting. The costs could be high.

2024-06-12T09:45:00+00:00

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

A long-running conservative push to get rid of countywide polling places is winning growing interest from state lawmakers, as well as a spot on the state Republican party’s list of legislative priorities for next year.

But election officials are warning that if legislators scrap the state’s countywide voting program, they will struggle to pull off the changes that would be required — beginning with increasing their numbers of polling places. That means paying for hard-to-find additional locations, recruiting and paying workers to staff them, and obtaining more voting equipment.

Election officials also worry that confused voters could be disenfranchised by the shift.

Currently, 96 counties allow voters to cast ballots anywhere in their county on election day, according to the Texas Secretary of State’s Office. The list includes counties in every part of the state, collectively encompassing roughly 14.9 million, or 83%, of the state’s registered voters.

Banning the program would force those voters to again cast their ballots only at their assigned precinct, after years of allowing them to go to any voting site in the county.

Voters who mistakenly go to the wrong site would be offered a provisional ballot, said Roxzine Stinson, the Lubbock County elections administrator, and if they aren’t able to instead go to their assigned precinct, “then that’s their only option. And voting provisionally, that’s no guarantee that that vote is going to count, because they’d be voting outside of their assigned polling location.”

Critics of countywide voting — who testified before a Senate State Affairs Committee hearing last month — allege without evidence that it makes elections less secure because it allows people “to double or triple vote.” Countywide voting relies on using electronic voting equipment, and critics say that election officials manipulate such equipment to change votes and sway election outcomes, but they haven’t shown evidence to back up those claims, and experts say they are false.

Local election officials who have overseen countywide voting for years say they have yet to see any such fraud occur. State election officials, too, have for years deemed countywide voting successful and say it is well-liked by voters who use it.

Election administrators say they are already struggling to comply with legislation passed last year requiring them to increase the number of polling locations they operate and to increase the number of hours and days of early voting. Some have had trouble finding public buildings that comply with access requirements for voting sites. In other areas, where funding can’t stretch to pay for the additional required hours, election officials have had to shut down early voting sites, resulting in less access for voters.

In Lubbock County, Stinson estimates eliminating countywide voting will require spending at least $300,000 more on elections, and “that’s just a start. Because it’ll take more workers, more training and more equipment.”

Eliminating countywide voting would require more sites, workers

Texas is among 18 states offering countywide voting or vote centers, including Arizona, Arkansas, Indiana, and Tennessee.

Created in 2003 by an election official in Larimer County, Colorado, the vote center model was designed to meet accessibility requirements stipulated in the Help America Vote Act of 2002. The federal law set aside funds to address issues with outdated voting technology and voting access problems after the 2000 presidential election. The requirements were costly, and some counties would have had to provide additional voting equipment at hundreds of locations. The vote center model allowed counties to offer fewer locations, but gave voters access to cast their ballots at all of them. State officials must approve counties’ participation in the program.

Texas began offering the option in 2006, after a Republican state representative introduced a bill setting up a pilot program. The bill won bipartisan support; participating counties were required to have electronic poll books and other voter registration management tools necessary to ensure voters only cast a single ballot.

Lubbock County, a Republican stronghold, was the first to sign up. County commissioners and community leaders were involved in selecting the vote center locations and ensuring that they were easily accessible to all voters, Stinson said, and residents have become accustomed to voting wherever is most convenient for them.

Stinson said she and her staff already have trouble recruiting enough election workers for the county’s 40-plus vote centers. She’s not certain whether she’d be able to recruit the minimum of three election workers per location for the additional 40 locations she’d need to open if the county is required to return to precinct voting.

“If we’re struggling now, what makes you think we’re going to be able to just open up that many more locations and that we’re going to get that many more workers?” Stinson said.

Election officials also note that the countywide system provides more options for voters if something goes wrong on the day of an election.

For example, during this year’s primary runoff election in May, a storm forced at least a dozen polling locations in Harris County to shut down after losing power. And in North Texas, at least 76 polling places in four counties closed after the weather left hundreds of thousands of residents without power.

Counties in those affected areas use vote centers. Although some polling sites closed, voters in those areas were still able to cast a ballot at open locations across their counties.

Shannon Lackey, the Randall County elections administrator, said that if those counties were precinct-based, “they would potentially have to turn away voters, there would be no way for them to cast a ballot.”

The same alternative is useful, she pointed out, if a water main breaks at a particular location, if equipment goes down, or if paper jams.

For Texans with disabilities, voting at a precinct polling location, which would typically be located within a neighborhood, isn’t always the most accessible option, said Chase Bearden, deputy executive director of the Coalition of Texans with Disabilities.

“Sometimes streets and sidewalks are torn up and aren’t paved. If you don’t have a vehicle, public transportation is necessary and some neighborhood locations may not be near a bus stop,” Bearden said. “A lot of people with disabilities, once they find a location that is accessible and meets their needs, they continue going back to it. That wasn’t always the case with precinct-based locations.”

Critics make unsupported allegations about vulnerabilities

The program’s most vocal critics have for years falsely claimed the use of electronic voting equipment in counties that participate in the program has led to malfeasance by election officials. Some Republican lawmakers have paid attention.

Last year, Senate Bill 990, authored by North Texas Republican state Sen. Bob Hall, aimed to eliminate the countywide voting program and require residents to vote at their assigned precinct. The bill, which passed the Senate but did not advance in the House, would have still permitted use of vote centers during early voting.

At the time Hall alleged countywide voting creates “unexplainable inconsistencies,” though he didn’t supply details or evidence. He said his measure would prevent inaccurate vote totals and that it would also prevent people from voting more than once. During Senate floor debates, Democrats who opposed the bill pressed him for evidence that countywide polling had allowed voters to cast ballots at more than one location. He didn’t provide any.

At the Senate State Affairs Committee hearing last month, chair Bryan Hughes, a Republican who has championed some of the state’s most restrictive voting laws, had invited testimony from Beth Biesel, a Dallas County Republican poll watcher and proponent of hand-counting ballots. Experts have said time and time again that hand counting is not accurate, and is far more costly than using voting machines to tabulate results.

At the hearing, Biesel falsely claimed voting machines were connected to the internet. She also falsely claimed that the program had contributed to a recent problem where people could use a series of public records requests to pierce ballot secrecy and figure out how certain people voted. In fact, that problem stems from Texas’ push to make almost all election records public, allowing researchers, in some limited instances, to cross-reference different public records and find a specific voter’s ballot image. (The state recently moved to eliminate that possibility, following reporting by Votebeat and The Texas Tribune.) Biesel proposed that lawmakers eliminate countywide voting, get rid of electronic voting equipment, have everyone vote at their assigned precinct, and hand-count ballots.

The hearing witness list signals the preferred approach of committee leadership, said Brandon Rottinghaus, a professor of political science at the University of Houston.

“Specifically, you’ll see allies are going to get softball questions,” Rottinghaus said. “Putative enemies often become strawman arguments in favor of whatever lawmakers’ preferred point is.”

Some lawmakers who heard Beisel’s concerns then turned to one official with the Secretary of State’s Office for clarity. “If I’m voting for Mickey Mouse for President, can that be manipulated?” state Sen. Charles Perry, a Republican of West Texas, asked.

Elections division director Christina Adkins promised that no voting machines in the state are connected to the internet. “We do not allow wireless connectivity on our voting devices, we test that in the certification process,” said Adkins, who was also invited by Hughes to testify.

She added that, although concerns over ballot secrecy are valid, those problems are not exclusive to countywide voting. “It extends to early voting. It extends to voting by mail,” Adkins said.

Adkins added that countywide voting could be improved by finding more efficient ways to reconcile election results in order to make post-election auditing easier for election officials, and lawmakers at the hearing agreed. However, it’s too soon to tell the kind of legislation they’ll propose. Lawmakers are expected to begin filing legislation after the November presidential election.

Natalia Contreras covers election administration and voting access for Votebeat in partnership with the Texas Tribune. Contact Natalia at ncontreras@votebeat.org

Georgia bill to strip QR codes from ballots would cost tens of millions of dollars

2024-05-02T19:30:56+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.

Update, May 13, 2024: Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp signed this bill, SB 189, on May 7 without releasing a statement. Any funding for this measure will need to be addressed by the legislature in future sessions.

Tucked inside a massive elections bill passed last month by Georgia’s legislature is a provision that requires the state to spend millions of dollars to overhaul the state’s existing voting system, or to purchase a new one before 2026.

Election officials and experts say it’s an impossible timeline, and that the vague language of the bill may prevent the use of electronic tabulators altogether. Lawmakers allocated no money for the change, which would remove computer-readable QR codes and other barcodes that the state’s voting system relies on to accurately tabulate ballots.

“We’re talking about an expense of about $25-to-$26 million, to about $300 million, depending on how you want to do it,” Gabe Sterling, the chief operating officer in the secretary of state’s office, told the House Governmental Affairs Committee on March 20, eight days before the bill passed the House. If lawmakers wanted to proceed, Sterling told them, they should write the legislation to make the changes contingent on appropriating enough money to pay for them, and move the effective date back to give election officials more time.

Lawmakers have already pushed the effective date back two years — from 2024 to 2026 — but did not make the change contingent on providing funding. So if the governor signs the bill now, it’s not clear where election officials will get the money.

The ban on computer-readable codes made headlines when the bill passed, but the cost — which legislators have known about for months — has not been previously reported.

The legislation would make the state’s current voting system, put in place in 2020 at a cost of more than $100 million, impossible for the state to use. Sterling says that if the governor signs it, Georgia will spend millions of dollars “to achieve absolutely nothing.”

And depending on how the secretary of state’s office chooses to interpret the coding provisions, the cost could spiral. Because the state’s current system is designed to read QR codes, the least costly fix requires the office to update every single piece of voting equipment in the state — about 40,000 pieces of hardware, each requiring about 25 minutes of individual attention — and purchase a limited amount of new hardware.

The more expensive option would mean purchasing an entirely new system capable of optical character recognition, a technology for scanning and interpreting individual letters. The options for that likely won’t be available in necessary quantities before 2026.

Sterling believes either avenue is likely to lead to a lawsuit. He said the unclear requirements would also put the state and counties at great risk of lawsuits.

“People who like this and people who don’t like this will sue us,” he said, because there is no consistent understanding of how the language should be enforced. “The words in the bill do not make sense.”

Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp must sign or veto the bill by May 7.

QR codes ‘may be perfectly fine’

The provision about computer-readable codes is a small part of the 24-page elections bill, which has provisions ranging from chain-of-custody requirements for equipment to the creation of pilot programs for new voting technology. A veto would force the state legislature to try again on the package.

In a statement, Kemp spokesman Carter Chapman said that the governor is still reviewing the bill, and that his office would provide an update after taking action.

Election integrity activists have been fighting the use of QR codes on ballots nationwide, claiming without evidence that such codes could be used by malicious actors to swing elections. State Senate Ethics Committee Chairman Max Burns, the Sylvania Republican who sponsored the measure, said it would “create clarity” and allow voters to know the machine interpreted their votes the same way they do.

“It is technically possible to remove the QR code or any other encoded, non-human readable content and read the actual content of the ballot,” he said in January. “We’re gonna leave the details and the technical requirements up to the secretary of state as they work through the implementation of this.”

In another hearing that month, he said the scanning of human-readable text could be “integrated” into the state’s current system. While that’s technically possible, Sterling said, the process will be slow and expensive in ways the bill doesn’t account for.

House Speaker Jon Burns acknowledged at a January press conference that he had a limited understanding of the issue, but nonetheless said he believed the transition would be “easy.”

“If you understand how the QR code works exactly, I’d be glad to meet with you after this, and certainly you can help me,” he said. Pressed by reporters for evidence of flaws with the current system, he said that QR codes “may be perfectly fine” but that the public’s lack of confidence was reason enough to make the change.

That was a popular rationale for many who voted to pass the bill in the House. But prior to the vote a few weeks ago, state Rep. Saira Draper, a Democrat, said lawmakers were “justifying sloppy and rushed policy choices by saying we need to bring more confidence to our elections, when you know just as well as I do that there is a very vocal minority out there who will never be confident in the process so long as their candidates is not declared the winner.”

She compared the bill to “negotiating with terrorists.”

Lawmakers were warned of the risks

The relevant section of the bill bans the use of “a QR code, bar code, or similar coding” to count ballots. All counting, it says, must be done using human-readable text, even though no voting system currently exists that meets that requirement as written.

One system, from Texas-based Hart Intercivic, has such a feature, but the small company is unlikely to be able to produce enough machines to replace every scanner in Georgia in the next two years. And even those rely on computer programming: Scanners aren’t human beings, says Sterling. They have to be programmed to read English words and characters in place of codes.

Records show Sen. Burns and Speaker Burns (who aren’t related) and other legislators ignored warnings from the secretary of state’s office sent over several months, which described this change as “impossible” to implement and “a solution in search of a problem.” Neither lawmaker has responded to requests for comment.

Given the wording of the bill, counties may be prevented from using scanners at all, said Joseph Kirk, the election supervisor in Bartow County, a county of about 100,000 voters in northwest Georgia.

“A strict interpretation of the bill could force us to hand-count ballots, which is substantially less accurate than scanning them,” said Kirk. “I hope the legislature will work with Georgia’s election officials in the coming years to allow us to continue to provide accurate results as we move toward the next generation of voting technology as required by the bill.”

Other developed countries do hand counts, but U.S. elections typically have significantly more choices. And academic studies over the decades have found that hand-counting American elections is error prone, slow, and expensive.

In multiple letters and meetings with lawmakers over several months, the secretary of state’s staff offered proof that the underlying claims of QR code manipulation were being taken out of context or misinterpreted. Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger has suggested other options to audit the count. The state also already requires risk-limiting audits by law.

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

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The fear of noncitizen voting is as baseless as it has been for 200 years

2024-04-22T08:45:00+00:00

Votebeat is a nonprofit news organization reporting on voting access and election administration across the U.S. A version of this post was originally distributed in Votebeat’s free weekly newsletter. Sign up to get future editions, including the latest reporting from Votebeat bureaus and curated news from other publications, delivered to your inbox every Saturday.

After President Donald Trump and House Speaker Mike Johnson last week advocated for a bill banning noncitizen voting, the news coverage made clear that it’s already illegal for noncitizens to vote and, crucially, that it isn’t a real problem.

Trump is still very eager to relitigate 2020, and Johnson’s trip to Florida to promote the scheme was widely received as the kind of reciprocal gesture we’ve seen before. The speaker, who’s struggling to maintain conservative support for his leadership job, got a photo with Trump, and Trump gets to use Johnson’s credibility to bolster the same debunked arguments he’s been making since his loss. USA Today reported that a person close to the planning said it was intended as an encouragement for other Republican officials to “get on the team” on the issue of noncitizen voting.

To understand the false election claims that are the basis for the legislation Johnson and Trump announced, check out the thorough fact-checking articles like CNN’s. Beyond that, there’s not much to say about the substance of a bill that doesn’t exist and is not meant to achieve a real purpose. But there is much more to understand about the historical context behind Trump’s push, which helps you see it for what it is.

Fear-mongering over noncitizen voting is among the oldest tactics in American electoral politics. The Republican Party is not trying to assemble a squad of noncitizen-voting hardliners; it is fomenting this fear to anger its base into turning out. Parties have done it dozens of times in our history, even before noncitizen voting was illegal in this country.

A sampling:

Antagonism toward those born on foreign soil for their perceived transience and poverty has been influencing American public policy since our earliest days as a nation.
In the 1800s, states began to enact residency and citizenship requirements where there were none before. For example, In 1854, fearing waves of immigration to southern Louisiana, the state enacted a two-year residency requirement. In 1850, Maryland enacted a six-month residency requirement aimed almost exclusively at excluding the immigrant population in Baltimore.
World War I, and the xenophobia it inspired, led to states banning anyone without citizenship from voting in the 1910s and ‘20s. Arkansas was the very last state to ban noncitizens from participating in elections in 1926. That made the 1928 presidential election the first in which no state allowed noncitizens to participate.
In the 1930s, after an economic collapse, hostility toward poor people and immigrants receiving relief aid led to wide talk of disenfranchisement. In Kansas, agricultural workers were told that if they voted, they would be removed from the “transient relief” rolls. The existence of poll taxes, though, made it unlikely that the poor would be able to vote in most places, anyway.
Immigration plummeted during World War II, not reviving until the ‘60s. By then, the Civil Rights era was in full swing. This led to a lasting crackdown on non-white voters across the country that frequently involved accusations of fraudulent voting by noncitizens. This didn’t happen just in the Deep South. Places like Kentucky, California, and Indiana also tightened registration requirements and residency periods during this time.
Governors of large red states have, in recent decades, made headlines for claiming to have long lists of noncitizens registered to vote. In every circumstance, the lists contained thousands of incorrectly flagged eligible voters, and the claims were largely retracted. See: Texas and Florida.
It’s, of course, not even new for Trump to raise the specter of noncitizen voting. He has been going on about this since he first ran for president in 2016. His own presidential commission aimed at rooting out voter fraud, based on his false claim that he lost the popular vote in 2016 because of noncitizen voting, disbanded after two meetings.
In 2017, Trump claimed that his friend, professional golfer Bernhard Langer, was prevented from casting a ballot due to a long line of what he assumed to be noncitizen voters. Langer himself wasn’t a citizen, and this incident never happened.

So not only is it false to say that noncitizen voting is a problem, it is also completely unoriginal. It is the same rhetoric people have used to stoke fear in this country for 200 years.

It is not logical that an immigrant who’s ineligible to vote would risk jail or deportation to cast a single ballot in an election. The cost-benefit analysis for such a vulnerable person doesn’t make any sense. The reason bans on noncitizen voting have never caught on as federal legislation is that there is simply nothing to legislate.

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

Lawmakers in Virginia briefly had an idea to keep its voter rolls updated without ERIC

2024-02-26T12:00:00+00:00

Virginia election officials continue to face a major challenge keeping their voter rolls up to date after the state withdrew last year from the data-sharing coalition ERIC, the Electronic Registration Information Center. As Votebeat recently reported, the state has since spent tens of thousands of dollars to get access to just a sliver of data it used to get through its ERIC membership.

For a brief moment, it looked like the state might have found part of a solution — but one that apparently is now a casualty of politics and a misunderstanding.

A pair of bills, HB 565 and SB 315, would have allowed the state to automatically update a person’s voter registration if they updated their drivers license address with the DMV. It’s a simple type of change and one that has worked in other states.

Trey Grayson, former Kentucky Secretary of State and chair of the nonpartisan Secure Elections Project, was advocating on behalf of the bill. “This would be huge for Virginia,” Grayson told me late the previous week, before the bills went kaput. He said it’s particularly important now that the state has abandoned its primary sources of voter roll data. “In a lot of ways, this is better than ERIC — it requires nothing of the voter and keeps the rolls up to date seamlessly.”

Right now, when a Virginia voter updates their information with the DMV, they are asked to affirm that they also want to update their voter registration. A lot of people just hit no, not realizing their registration is out of date or just wanting to get the heck off of a DMV website. This bill, instead, allows the system to automatically detect whether a home address has been changed, and then forward that change to the state elections office, which will verify the information matches and update the record without any additional steps from the voter.

It’s not rocket science, and it’s also not that difficult to implement. Other states that have put similar programs in place have reported great success. While Colorado, for example, wired up the program as part of a larger launch of automatic voter registration, Kentucky implemented a program without one. Rather than shifting how people register to vote or their eligibility, this approach would allow two state agencies to more freely share information.

One of the biggest drawbacks of the bill was evidently a misunderstanding of what it would actually do — the word “automatic” led lawmakers and advocates to assume the bills proposed a form of automatic voter registration, a more ambitious system that registers new voters if they engage with the DMV for any reason and are eligible to be registered.

“I’ve always been frustrated by the naming of this reform,” Grayson told me.

Critics also falsely assume, Grayson says, that any interaction with the DMV, like changing the address on a vehicle registration, would update the voter registration, which Grayson’s group was trying to debunk.

Tony Franquiz, a spokesman for the Secure Elections Project, also said Republican lawmakers had been “provided with faulty info on cost and the implementation” of the bill. While estimates suggested this bill would have saved money, “diverging opinions” still existed on the “complexity and cost of implementation.”

The misinformation surrounding the legislation was probably its undoing — as was a puzzling strategy by its Democratic sponsors. Ahead of a planned vote on the measure, both sponsors of the legislation opted to table it “in exchange for a seat at the table during the interim to discuss the bill and open up a discussion on a broader automatic voter registration package,” said Franquiz. “The bill is effectively dead for this session.”

Though, he said, there is talk of a potential retreat this summer for lawmakers to discuss a AVR package.

So now, a straightforward bill that was mistaken as a form of AVR, and hindered because of it, could now get rolled into an actual AVR bill. The right flank of the GOP — as local opposition to even the word “automatic” might suggest — have been agitating against AVR across the country for quite some time. Opposition to it is a favorite talking point of right-wing think tanks and activist groups, like the Heritage Foundation and True the Vote. Republicans in Pennsylvania are, right now, suing the governor over the issue.

Democrats, who control Virginia’s legislature, may be able to pass such a bill on a party-line vote, but it’s unlikely to fly with Republican Gov. Glenn Youngkin. I’ve reached out to Sen. Saddam Salim, who sponsored the legislation and agreed to pull it, with questions but haven’t heard back. We’ll update this on Votebeat’s website if I do.

“The reality is that it is really hard to do bipartisan election legislation right now,” Grayson told me in a text message after the bill’s demise. “Hopefully this bill starts a conversation in Virginia about how to make voter rolls more accurate and that conversation will yield some fruit in a future legislative session.”

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

Some Texas counties struggle to meet new law’s demand for more polling places

2024-01-24T15:41:41+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.

Some Texas election officials are running out of time before the March 5 primary to find sufficient polling locations, equipment, and election workers mandated by a new Republican-backed election law, and may not be able to meet its requirements.

The new law requires certain counties currently using vote centers for countywide voting to drastically increase the number of polling locations. Election officials say the new mandate is costly, and presents a series of new challenges for the counties that must comply.

In some counties, election officials are concerned about whether they’ll have enough money to purchase more equipment and pay rental fees for additional locations. In others, it’s unclear whether they’ll find enough election workers to staff more voting sites.

The local Republican party in the state’s most populous county wants Texas legislators to change the law, saying the unintended consequences of it are reshaping the way it holds its primary this year.

Teneshia Hudspeth, the Harris County Clerk in charge of local elections, told county commissioners earlier this month that the county must now add more than 100 polling places compared to the number in the 2022 and 2020 primaries — for a total of 512.

In Harris County primaries, Republican and Democratic voters typically use separate machines. Because of that, Hudspeth said she would need to double up on machines at each new site, and that’s not logistically possible, she said. There just isn’t enough equipment or time to buy more.

“We can’t put every single piece of equipment out on the field because we have to have backup equipment to address a challenge [when another location] needs updated equipment or a scanner is not working,” Hudspeth said.

The best available solution, Hudspeth said, was for the county’s Democratic and Republican parties to agree for the first time to share voting equipment in a jointly run primary. Democrats quickly agreed. Republicans were reluctant, but eventually signed on.

Cindy Siegel, Harris County’s GOP chair, told Votebeat the party would prefer to keep its primary separate because it wants complete oversight and control. She said the new mandate prevents Republicans from conducting the primary election as they see fit, the party’s prerogative under state law.

In Texas, the political parties can choose to contract with the county election office to conduct a joint primary — sharing polling locations, voting equipment, and election workers — or have separate primaries. For years in Harris, Democrats and Republicans held separate primaries, sharing only polling locations. That meant voters could head to any polling location to cast their ballot, but once there, Republicans would use one side of the room to vote and Democrats in the other, processed by separate teams of election workers and using separate voting machines. The parties can’t do that this year.

“Because of this, we’re forced to do a joint primary,” Siegel said. She plans to ask lawmakers to change the statute next year.

“We need to be able to have the choice,” she said. “That’s why legislators have to be really careful and look for those unintended consequences. But these things happen, and now this is what we’re stuck dealing with.”

The new law, Senate Bill 924, took effect in September and prevents counties that use the countywide voting program from combining small voting precincts into larger ones. In other words, election officials in those counties — about 90 across the state, where voters can cast a ballot anywhere in their county on Election Day — were able to centralize voting across lots of precincts that due to redistricting have fewer than 500 voters. Some of those smaller precincts have only 10 voters and there are some with just one voter each. The flexibility of combining them saved counties money by using a single polling site to serve several voters in a high-traffic area or where it’s more convenient for them to cast a ballot.

Whether these counties will have to drastically increase their numbers of polling locations in November will depend on how many they already operate in general elections. Some already offer a large number of locations and would not need to add more to comply.

The bill wasn’t designed to have this effect.

Senate Bill 924, as originally written by a North Texas Republican, state Sen. Drew Springer, gave smaller counties that don’t use countywide voting the option to combine precincts. Lawmakers didn’t change that part. Those counties can now group precincts together, as long as such combinations don’t grow to more than 10,000 registered voters — double what was previously allowed.

But a last-minute amendment on the House floor in May introduced by state Rep. John Bucy, an Austin Democrat, changed how counties using the countywide voting program must calculate the number of voting sites they offer, forcing the minimum number of sites higher. The amended bill passed solely on Republican votes, with Bucy voting against it and without a public hearing.

Bucy told Votebeat in August that the purpose of his amendment was to protect voting access and prevent the loss of more voting locations.

Springer acknowledged the problems the new law had created. To fix the unintended problems, in the middle of last year’s third called special session, Springer filed more legislation, Senate Bill 76. The bill, which specifically strikes the amendment introduced by Bucy, did not get a hearing and died without a vote.

Some election officials fear voters could be negatively affected

The new law does not provide any additional money for counties to offset all the new expenses, including paying more election workers, buying additional voting equipment, or establishing added locations. Two dozen other counties, including Bexar, Tarrant, Hays, Cameron, Williamson, Lubbock, Ellis, Midland, and San Patricio, have also been trying to find additional polling locations, workers, and enough voting equipment.

In rural areas of the state, where buildings and adequate facilities are scarce, some election officials are still struggling to find usable additional polling sites.

Trudy Hancock, the Brazos County elections administrator, told Votebeat that out of the nearly 30 additional polling places needed for the primary election, she’s secured only four locations. Before the new law, the county operated 25 polling locations for primary elections. Under the new mandate, that number has doubled.

Hancock said that for the primary, she and the chairs of the Democratic and Republican parties have reached out to as many churches, community centers, and homeowners associations as possible, asking to use their facilities. But it has not been easy to find organizations that comply with the Americans with Disabilities Act and are willing to host voting while also offering enough secure space for multiple rows of voting equipment, along with plenty of parking, she said. Although Brazos is home to more than 200,000 people and Texas A&M University, a large part of the county outside of Bryan and College Station is mostly farmland.

Even if Hancock and the political parties were able to find enough locations in time, Hancock is also concerned she won’t be able to find the more than 100 additional election workers needed to operate the locations, plus more than $100,000 for more voting equipment.

Overall, she warns, voters could be negatively affected. “We’d have to be pulling resources from our larger locations in order to staff the new ones,” Hancock said, “And so you’re looking at more problems and longer lines at those large locations, because they won’t be staffed adequately.”

Meanwhile, counties that fail to provide the additional locations or fail to comply with the new rules could risk legal challenges from candidates. It’s unclear whether counties would face repercussions from the state if they can’t meet the exact number of required polling places, given that officials are fully aware of the difficulties the law has created.

Officials with the Texas Secretary of State’s office have heard these concerns since at least August.

Earlier this month, during a gathering of more than 100 election administrators in Amarillo, Christina Adkins, the state’s elections division director, told election officials to keep records of every step they took to comply.

“Documentation is important so that if there’s a challenge to your election, you’ll be able to tell the story of how you got here,” Adkins said. “Show that you have made a good-faith effort to comply with the law.”

Natalia Contreras covers election administration and voting access for Votebeat in partnership with the Texas Tribune. Natalia can be reached at ncontreras@votebeat.org.

Michigan to automatically register people to vote when exiting prison

2023-12-02T00:15:21+00:00

People completing sentences for felony convictions will automatically be registered to vote as they prepare to leave prison, the result of first-of-its-kind legislation signed Thursday by Gov. Gretchen Whitmer.

House Bill 4983 expands the state’s automatic voter registration system — which currently registers voters when they get a driver’s license — to other state agencies such as the Department of Corrections and the Department of Health and Human Services.

As part of the law, which goes into effect in June 2025, the secretary of state and the Department of Corrections must coordinate to issue a state identification or driver’s license when individuals are released, which will also automatically register them to vote unless they opt out.

The new law will codify and expand a voter registration effort the Department of Corrections has had since 2020 as part of its program to provide vital documents such as birth certificates, Social Security cards, and state ID cards or drivers’ licenses, said Michigan Department of Corrections spokesman Kyle Kaminski.

The new law will ensure the voter registration effort is permanent, “even when those who helped develop this system are no longer in their roles,” Kaminski said. “Being engaged members of their communities, including voting, is an important element of reentry for all returning citizens.”

Currently, incarcerated individuals can choose to have the prison submit their personal information to the Department of State, which then uses it to finalize the person’s registration once they have exited prison and officially regained the right to vote, Kaminski said.

Under the new law, the Department of State will automatically process their voter registration, and the returning citizens, like other Michigan residents, can opt out later by responding to a notice from the Michigan secretary of state or through a written request to their city or township clerk, according to Cheri Hardmon, a spokeswoman for the secretary of state.

The current opt-out rate, added Hardmon, is quite low: From March 2021 to November 2023, 6,072 formerly incarcerated individuals were eligible to be automatically registered to vote, and only 12% did not.

State Rep. Penelope Tsernoglou (D-East Lansing), chair of the House Elections Committee and the author of House Bill 4983, said the new law will greatly benefit those leaving prison and trying to reintegrate back into their communities. Democrats passed the bill Nov. 8 in the House on a party line vote, 56-53. In the Senate, the bill passed with four votes from Republicans, 24-14.

“I think not only being able to vote but being registered and encouraged is really important,” Tsernoglou said Thursday.

Tsernoglou said activists and groups met with her a year ago, advocating changing the law to ensure automatic voter registration for formerly incarcerated individuals.

The automatic voter registration bill was included in a larger package of 23 election and democracy bills Whitmer, a Democrat, signed Thursday, ranging from laws regulating the use of artificial intelligence in campaign ads to pre-registering 16-year-olds so they automatically become voters at 18. The package was part of Democratic lawmakers’ ambitious agenda to expand voting access for the 2024 elections, when they will again be trying to keep the state under Democratic control and deliver the state’s electoral votes to President Biden after a narrow victory in 2020.

“Today, we are expanding voting rights and strengthening our democracy,” said Whitmer Thursday in a press statement.

HB 4983 goes farther than a piece of legislation introduced earlier this year by former Michigan Rep. Lori Stone, a Democrat who recently left the House after she was elected as Warren mayor. Stone introduced House Bill 4534 that would require the Michigan Department of Corrections to provide voting information to returning citizens, including details about how to find their assigned polling place in their local community and the election schedule.

That bill has stalled in the state House but could be revived, Tsernoglou said. She added that it would complement the automatic voter registration for formerly incarcerated individuals by educating them on their right to vote and the how-tos of voting.

Detroit Pastor Terrence Devezin, who heads the United Kingdom Church on the city’s west side, applauds the new law, saying it will play a huge role in helping men and women re-entering their communities from prison.

“It’s absolutely great,” Devezin said. “It takes away the bitterness of being locked up. To have both [an ID and a voter registration] makes them feel ‘I’m a citizen now. I’m considered one of you all now.’”

Vince King, who was formerly incarcerated and works with others coming out of prison to get established back into their communities, said the new law “solves two big challenges,” referring to obtaining identification and the right to vote.

King said being behind bars presented many barriers to political participation, and restored voting rights means returning citizens can support candidates that address issues that might affect their daily lives, especially for Black men, such as economics, racial equality, and justice.

Registering to vote will prompt many formerly incarcerated individuals to begin viewing voting differently, said King, and regain “a sense of normalcy” and feeling of belonging to their communities.

“They’re getting involved in this system that they would not have been involved in before,” said King. “I’ll never forget the first time I cast that ballot.”

Oralandar Brand-Williams is a senior reporter for Votebeat in partnership with Bridge Michigan. Contact Oralandar at obrand-williams@votebeat.org.

Pa. House advances bill to move 2024 primary while rejecting voter ID, mail ballot changes

2023-10-05T19:35:31+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.

The Pennsylvania House has advanced a bill to change the date of the 2024 presidential primary while rejecting an effort to implement expanded voter ID requirements, mail ballot rule changes, and a slew of other provisions.

In a contentious session Thursday that included singing, yelling, and arguments over the events of Jan. 6, the state House passed a bill along party lines that would move the date of the 2024 presidential primary from April 23 to April 2.

A second bill to move the primary to March 19 — previously approved by the state Senate — failed with a wide margin of bipartisan opposition. By the time of the vote, that bill had morphed into an omnibus election reform package.

“This bill should have been in the Senate by June,” state Rep. Seth Grove (R., York) said of the legislation to move the primary to April 2, capturing the sentiment of many Republican legislators and county leaders.

In a statement, state Senate Majority Leader Joe Pittman (R., Indiana) did not directly address whether leadership will bring the April 2 measure up for a vote. The chamber had opted for March 19 as the date for the primary when it passed a bill last month.

“We have tried to advance a new primary date out of respect for the Jewish holiday,” the statement said. “Those efforts have clearly not been successful and the window to make any change is rapidly closing given the House actions this week.”

State Senate leaders have yet to publicly comment on whether they will bring the April 2 proposal up for a vote. The chamber had opted for March 19 as the date for the primary when it passed a bill last month.

The current date of the 2024 primary, April 23, conflicts with the Jewish holiday of Passover and places the swing state late in the primary cycle. While the effort to move the primary has received bipartisan, bicameral, and gubernatorial support, counties, school boards, and a legislative advisory board are concerned it will strain local election offices, especially if lawmakers drag the decision out.

There are only 180 days until April 2, 2024.

“The hour is late, and counties have already made a lot of decisions,” state Rep. Russ Diamond (R., Lebanon) said Thursday.

The Election Law Advisory Board — a joint commission of the Legislature whose members include representatives from both chambers, counties, and the Department of State — agreed.

In a letter obtained by Votebeat and Spotlight PA last week, the board said it had “reservations” about the effort to move the primary and that any such change should be made “at least a year before the election.”

County officials are primarily concerned that changing the date on such short notice will make it difficult to secure polling places and workers to staff those locations.

“The big thing we heard about today is absolutely, probably the biggest factor … the polling locations and the poll workers,” Snyder County Commissioner Joe Kantz, who sits on the board, told Votebeat and Spotlight PA after a meeting of the board last month.

Many usual poll workers may have made other plans, given the short notice. Polling locations are also typically notified of election dates a year or more in advance.

More time is also needed to prepare now than in the past due to Pennsylvania’s still relatively new no-excuse mail balloting law.

“Our calendars have gotten a lot bigger,” Kantz said. “So if we move the primary ahead, that’s going to condense that that much more. … The Legislature is going to do what they want to do, and so whatever they do, as counties always do, we’ll find a way to make it work, but it’s going to be painful.”

The three other states that had primaries scheduled for April 23 have already moved their dates.

Schools would be strongly affected in the event of a primary date change. School boards are required to allow their facilities to be used as polling places if requested. Already, they’ve set their calendars for an April 23 primary.

“If the primary election day is changed at this point, when school calendars have already been established, the change could close schools and interrupt student learning,” said Mackenzie Christiana, senior manager of communications of the Pennsylvania School Boards Association.

State law also ties school boards’ timeline to set their budgets to the primary election. An earlier primary, Christiana said, requires districts to “build their preliminary budgets just months into their new fiscal year.”

A bipartisan rejection

The March 19 bill, which passed the state Senate 45-2 last month, failed 26-177 in the state House midday Thursday, supported only by a handful of suburban Democrats.

State House lawmakers added three amendments to the measure Wednesday which substantially altered it.

Those amendments added new voter ID requirements and allowed for the processing of mail ballots ahead of Election Day, which is known as pre-canvassing. The amendments also removed dating requirements for mail ballots and updated the requirements to request election recounts, among other changes.

While counties have been strongly in favor of some of these changes — particularly pre-canvassing — the rapid introduction of the policies, coupled with logistical concerns moving the primary creates, caught them off-guard.

“If the Legislature wants to change the primary date, we suggest they focus on getting that bill to the governor’s desk, and not further delay action by adding unrelated amendments,” John Buffone, a spokesperson for the County Commissioners Association of Pennsylvania, said this week. “We have also asked that counties be included when election legislation is drafted to make sure the language can be successfully implemented, and we are significantly concerned about making other changes without appropriate time to fully review.”

Lisa Deeley, a Democratic city commissioner from Philadelphia, echoed that sentiment Wednesday.

“The amendment is well-meaning but not well written,” Deeley said in a statement, referring to the amendment that added pre-canvassing and other items to the March 19 bill. “It gives election officials very little and adds a ton of extra work [to] our plate. I urge everyone to vote against it. Opportunities to improve the Election Code come around so infrequently that we cannot keep making it worse.”

The bill’s politics are complicated. An amendment to require voters to show a photo ID every time they vote in person passed with support from every member of the Republican minority and 22 Democrats.

Expanding the state’s voter ID requirements is a Republican priority, and GOP lawmakers who control the state Senate have made it clear that they want it addressed alongside other election changes.

The language considered by the state House this week was authored by moderate state Rep. Tom Mehaffie (R., Dauphin). He told Votebeat and Spotlight PA he bounced the language off both Democratic Gov. Josh Shapiro and state House Majority Leader Matt Bradford (D., Montgomery).

“I believe in moving the primary,” Mehaffie told Votebeat and Spotlight PA. “And I also believe that this voter ID bill is a great compromise.”

A representative for the Shapiro administration offered no comment as to whether Mehaffie’s amendment is a version of voter ID the governor would support.

Without GOP backing, state House Democrats passed two other amendments that added ballot curing, pre-canvassing, and a permanent mail-voter list — the latter in a late-night committee meeting Wednesday — while using procedural motions to shut down Republican debate.

Combined with conservatives’ concerns that the voter ID language wasn’t strict enough, Republican support for the bill evaporated. Most Democrats, meanwhile, balked at supporting any bill with stricter voter identification standards.

“I think we have to be careful about going down a slippery slope when it comes to voter ID,” state Rep. Donna Bullock (D., Philadelphia) told Votebeat and Spotlight PA.

Talking to reporters after the vote, Bradford said that he knew the bill would fail, but saw it as a test of how far Republicans are willing to go to accomplish a top priority.

Act 77, the 2019 law that created no-excuse mail voting, “was threading a needle,” he said. “You’re going to need things on both sides to make it work.”

What’s next

The April 2 bill will now head to the state Senate for consideration.

The upper chamber is not scheduled to return to session until Oct. 16, meaning the earliest date Shapiro could receive the bill is late October. The proposed April 2 primary would be less than six months away at that point.

A spokesperson for Shapiro declined to comment on whether the governor would support the April 2 bill.

Carter Walker is a reporter for Votebeat in partnership with Spotlight PA. Contact Carter at cwalker@votebeat.org. Stephen Caruso is the Capitol Reporter for Spotlight PA. Contact Stephen at scaruso@spotlightpa.org.

Pennsylvania considers expansion to voter ID law

2023-10-05T01:03:33+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.

Update, Oct. 4: The state House adopted two amendments that would overhaul election laws on Wednesday, including expanded voter ID requirements, which passed with bipartisan support. Democrats passed another amendment along a party line vote, which includes three days of pre-canvassing mail ballots, a requirement that counties notify voters of disqualifying mail ballot errors, and other provisions.

The complete bill, which would also move Pennsylvania’s 2024 primary earlier, to March 19, could be passed out of the House as soon as Thursday. The amendments mean it would then need to go back to the Senate for another vote, followed by Gov. Josh Shapiro’s signature, before it becomes law.

Pennsylvania lawmakers are once again considering expanding the state’s voter ID requirements, this time as part of a larger proposal to change the date of the 2024 presidential primary.

The Democratic-controlled state House is expected to consider a Republican-authored amendment this week that would require voters to show proof of identification every time they cast a ballot in person. Currently, state law requires voters to show proof of identification the first time they vote at a polling place.

It’s unclear if there’s enough support in the 203-member chamber — where Democrats hold a one-vote advantage — to advance such a proposal. Neither Democratic Gov. Josh Shapiro nor the GOP-controlled state Senate have publicly weighed in on the measure.

But its introduction drew pushback from election access advocates, who raised concerns that expanding photo ID requirements would keep people who have voted without issue for years away from the polls.

The proposal is one of several that state House lawmakers plan to offer as soon as this Wednesday as amendments to an existing bill that proposes to move Pennsylvania’s 2024 presidential primary from April 24 to March 19.

Democrats want to make several changes to the rules regarding mail ballots, including adding a requirement that directs counties to notify voters if they incorrectly fill out a mail ballot and allow them to fix it.

County governments in charge of running elections were already concerned that changing the 2024 primary date would cause serious logistical problems, and the new amendments only added to their worries.

“If the legislature wants to change the primary date, we suggest they focus on getting that bill to the Governor’s desk, and not further delay action by adding unrelated amendments,” said John Buffone, spokesperson for the County Commissioners Association of Pennsylvania. “We have also asked that counties be included when election legislation is drafted to make sure the language can be successfully implemented, and we are significantly concerned about making other changes without appropriate time to fully review.”

Will Democrats back expanding voter ID?

A wide range of documents would meet the voter ID requirement under the new proposal, including any PennDOT ID for up to 12 months past its expiration date, and a student or work ID, according to draft language viewed by Spotlight PA and Votebeat. If the voter lacks a photo ID, up to 13 types of documents — including a utility bill, paystub, or lease — could be used as a substitute.

The proposal would also require PennDOT to provide IDs that meet the new provision’s requirements free of charge to voters if they request one. Voters could also ask another voter to vouch for them through a written affirmation if they lack one of the required IDs or documents.

State Rep. Tom Mehaffie (R., Dauphin) told Spotlight PA his measure is “very bipartisan.” A memo asking colleagues to support such an idea was co-signed by a Democratic state House member.

“In Pennsylvania, we are required to present identification the first time we vote as well as when we register to vote by mail,” the lawmakers wrote in the memo. “Requiring identification at the polls prevents fraud and will begin to rebuild confidence in our electoral system.”

The new voter ID requirements would not go into effect until 2025, Mehaffie said.

Kadida Kenner of the New Pennsylvania Project, a voting rights group, said her organization is watching the voter ID amendment with caution.

“New Pennsylvania Project is always going to be concerned about anything that puts an additional barrier in front of Pennsylvania voters,” she said. “What we are concerned about as an organization is this is the beginning of how voting rights get chipped away.”

While she recognized that many Pennsylvanians support expanding voter ID — polls show broad support— she does not think popularity equates to good policy, and that if more voters understood the additional barrier this creates, they would not be as supportive.

State House Democrats who spoke to Spotlight PA and Votebeat ran the gamut as to whether they would support this measure.

State Rep. Jared Solomon (D., Philadelphia), one of the lawmakers leading the charge to move the primary date, said he had yet to see the voter ID amendment language.

“I’m not sure what amendments are going to go on, but I think it is essential that we move this [primary],” Solomon said.

Proponents of changing the date of the 2024 primary argue that moving it earlier will increase Pennsylvania’s influence over the presidential election. Further, next year’s primary is scheduled to take place during Passover, a time when some Jews avoid writing, driving, and using electricity.

Other Democratic lawmakers are suspicious of any potential changes to voter ID requirements and said they would lean toward voting against such a proposal. First-year lawmaker Tarik Khan (D., Philadelphia) said he would have to see the language of the bill but is generally against any additional requirements.

“Generally, I’m very suspicious around voter ID because often it’s been used to disenfranchise people,” he said.

An omnibus in the making?

The underlying bill to change the primary date almost didn’t advance Tuesday, first failing in committee during an early morning meeting. House State Government Committee Chair Scott Conklin (D., Centre) reconvened the committee after a private meeting with House Democratic leadership. In the second meeting, the bill passed.

“Politics is like making sausage sometimes,” Conklin said. “And at the time that we voted this morning, there are other things in progress within government itself. So for that reason, we come back to reconsider [the bill] to also put it on the floor for a vote.”

As of Tuesday evening, state House lawmakers had proposed 16 amendments to the primary bill.

One of the amendments, from state Rep. Malcolm Kenyatta (D., Philadelphia), represents a laundry list of election reforms, many of which tackle gray areas around mail ballots that have been debated in the courts.

Included is the most sought-after change for counties: three days of pre-canvassing. County officials have advocated for more time to process mail ballots before Election Day since Pennsylvania’s no-excuse mail voting law greatly expanded their responsibilities a few years ago.

The amendment also provides a more specific definition for pre-canvassing, which it defines as unfolding and straightening out mail ballots, and putting them through tabulators. Those tabulators, which scan ballots and record each vote, could not be used to total those votes ahead of polls closing on Election Day.

Kenyatta’s proposal would also remove existing requirements for voters to date outer mail ballot envelopes and to return such ballots in an inner secrecy envelope.

The measure would require counties to notify voters of disqualifying mail ballot errors. The proposed language goes as far as requiring county election offices to send an employee to the home of a voter who cast a flawed ballot if they do not respond to a call, text, or email.

Additionally, the state would be required to conduct risk-limiting audits after each election, and counties would need to maintain chain of custody logs for ballots.

In a text message, Kenyatta said he was proposing “commonsense election reforms that strengthen our election system” and that he hoped it would receive bipartisan support.

“There’s a lot to like here,” said Kyle Miller, a policy advocate with the nonpartisan group Protect Democracy and a former aide to a Democratic member of the state Senate.

Miller pointed specifically to removing the dating and inner secrecy envelope requirements for mail ballots, as well as requiring counties to immediately examine mail ballots when they are received and notify voters of errors.

“Overall that’s the best thing about this amendment,” he said. “It provides uniformity to elections in all 67 counties rather than this patchwork of understanding by county solicitors.”

The amendment would also increase the cost to file a recount petition from $50 to $850, and requires that the petitions allege specific fraud. These petitions became an issue during last year’s gubernatorial and U.S. Senate elections.

“That’s a major provision there that will put a high burden of proof and protect elections from actors who are trying to subvert the election process,” Miller said.

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

Stephen Caruso is the capitol reporter for Spotlight PA. Kate Huangpu is a government reporter for Spotlight PA.

Intimidation and harassment of Michigan election workers could land violators in prison under new legislation

2023-09-13T23:14:20+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.

Michigan election workers and officials say they’ve endured threats to hang them from a tree, harassing phone calls filled with foul language, and other hostile behavior such as being followed near their homes while doing their jobs.

Under legislation introduced in the state House, intimidating, threatening, or harassing an election worker could be prosecuted as a criminal offense, up to a felony.

State Rep. Kara Hope, a Democrat, said at a Tuesday hearing of the Michigan House Election Committee that she introduced House Bills 4129 and 4130 to protect election workers and deter those threatening them.

“Elections cannot take place without election workers. That’s the bottom line,” Hope said. Election work is poorly paid and temporary, she said, and those who do it as a civic duty are “not willing to risk their own safety or their own peace of mind.” Hope said the legislation is timely because the state is adding in-person early voting, which will require more workers.

Under House Bill 4129, a person intimidating an election worker or preventing them from doing their job to the point that they would “feel terrorized, frightened, threatened, harassed, or molested” could be criminally charged, while House Bill 4130 would amend sentencing guidelines to make a habitual offense of intimidating or harassing an election worker a felony. If found guilty, violators could spend up to five years in prison.

Hope, who represents a district in Ingham County, said election workers are increasingly feeling unsafe and that the new law would give them an added measure of protection. The state doesn’t currently have a law specifically addressing threats against election workers.

In March, election officials testified about threats they experienced during and after the November 2020 election, including Detroit city clerk Janice Winfrey, who told lawmakers that someone shot at a staff member from her office.

Michigan is among 10 states where the risk of election disruption is high due to false allegations and “anti-voter” sentiments and activity over the past few years, according to the nonprofit, nonpartisan Brennan Center for Justice at NYU Law.

If passed, Michigan will join 12 other states that have similar laws protecting election workers.

Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson, testifying via Zoom at Tuesday’s hearing, said she has “experienced a lot of these threats firsthand,” including a high-profile December 2020 incident when people protested outside her house. Benson said the threats and harassment reported by election workers have been fueled by a multi-faceted and coordinated misinformation campaign aimed at Michigan and other key battleground states, including Arizona, Georgia, Nevada, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin.

The new bills “will ensure real accountability for anyone who harasses an election clerk,” she said.

Citing a Brennan Center for Justice survey released in April, Benson said 73 percent of local election officials reported feeling that threats had increased in recent years.

Last month, the U.S. Department of Justice announced charges against three suspects in separate cases involving threats against election officials in Michigan, Arizona and Georgia.

In Michigan, a 37-year-old Indiana man was charged for making threats against then-Rochester Hills clerk Tina Barton. According to the 3-page federal indictment, Andrew Nickels allegedly called Barton and left a voicemail saying, “We’re watching your … mouth talk about how you think that there’s no irregularities … [Y]ou frauded out America of a real election..Guess what, you’re gonna pay for it, you will pay for it…[T]en million plus patriots will surround you when you least expect it: your little infantile Deep State security agency has no time to protect you because they bought out and we’ll [expletive] kill you.. [Y]ou will [expletive] pay for your [expletive] lying ass remarks We will [expletive] take you out. [Expletive] your family, [expletive] your life, and you deserve a throat to the knife… Watch your [expletive] back …watch your [expletive] back.”

Nickels is charged with one count of making a threatening interstate communication. If convicted, he faces a maximum penalty of five years in prison. A jury trial has been scheduled for Oct. 10.

Barton wrote about the threats to her life on social media last month.

“I’m relieved to know that the man who officials believe is responsible for making explicit and terrifying death threats against me & my family has been identified. This has not been an easy thing for me & my family to go through for the last 2.5+ years,” Barton wrote. “I’m hopeful that today’s arraignment sends a strong message that threatening election officials is unacceptable and illegal.”

Lata Nott, senior legal counsel for the nonprofit Campaign Legal Center, which advocates on voting rights, also testified at Tuesday’s hearing, urging committee members to pass the legislation.

“Election workers across the country have been on the receiving end of an onslaught of threats, harassment …stalking that’s escalated into an undeniable crisis,” said Nott during her testimony via Zoom. “Michigan is no exception.”

Nott said a Campaign Legal Center study found that one out of six election workers nationally had experienced threats in connection with their jobs. Others have been forced to take new precautions. She pointed to Canton Township clerk Michael Siegrist, who said he made some security upgrades, such as relocating garbage cans where bombs could potentially be placed, following a security site assessment by U.S. Homeland Security agents. Siegrist said he installed a badge access system, increased security camera coverage, and focused on securing doors as part of $30,000 in security upgrades.

State Rep. Rachelle Smit, a Republican who represents a district covering part of Allegan, Barry, and Eaton counties, asked Hope if the bill would cover ballot challengers. Hope answered the bill is “strictly” about election workers.

Smit, a former clerk who says she has been harassed herself, also asked Benson if the state keeps track of threats against clerks and other election workers. Benson said the Michigan Attorney General would be in a position to collect such data.

Oralandar Brand-Williams is a senior reporter for Votebeat in partnership with Bridge Michigan. Contact Oralandar at obrand-williams@votebeat.org.

What’s at stake in the long-awaited trial over Texas’s sweeping 2021 elections law

2023-09-11T08:00:00+00:00

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

Two years after voting rights groups challenged Texas Republicans’ sweeping overhaul of its voting and election laws, the case comes to trial Monday in a federal court in San Antonio. The lengthy roster of plaintiffs will argue certain provisions of the new law made it harder for voters of color to cast ballots, with some alleging the effect was intentional.

More than 20 state and national organizations brought a collective five lawsuits against the law, often referred to as Senate Bill 1, that have been consolidated into this case. The groups claim several provisions of the law violate federal laws including the Voting Rights Act, the Americans with Disabilities Act, the Rehabilitation Act and the First, 14th, and 15th Amendments of the U.S. Constitution.

The trial is expected to go until late October, and U.S. District Judge Xavier Rodriguez may not issue a decision until months later. Experts say it’s unclear and too soon to tell whether a decision will come in time to affect elections and voting in 2024, especially since appeals could draw the process out.

Republicans rammed the law through in 2021, with Democrats accusing them of legislating in response to baseless and unsupported allegations of nonexistent voter fraud. Ever since, election observers have closely monitored the effects of the law’s changes to how Texans vote and how election officials administer elections.

“These rules have gotten so incredibly complicated, that now [voters] almost need a lawyer to understand what you can and cannot do,” said Nina Perales, the vice president of litigation at the Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund and a lead attorney representing plaintiffs La Union del Pueblo Entero and the Southwest Voter Registration Project.

For example, she said, it’s now illegal for a person who assists voters to receive or accept compensation. That’s the sort of work nonprofit advocacy groups have done for several years, especially for the elderly and people with disabilities.

“Some people don’t speak English. Some people can’t read or write. We have a lot of elderly in our community, people with disabilities, too. It is not true that every voter has somebody in their house with them, who can help them navigate the process. Some people turn to community resources for that,” Perales said.

Among the provisions the plaintiffs are challenging:

One that prohibits election officials from distributing mail-in ballot applications to voters who did not request them. The provision came in response to an effort in Harris County, the state’s most populous, to expand voting access during the 2020 COVID-19 pandemic, when election officials sent out absentee ballot applications to voters who were eligible to use them.
A ban on 24-hour and drive-thru voting. Harris County also provided those voting options during early voting in 2020. Republicans challenged drive-thru voting unsuccessfully at the time, and later banned it as part of SB 1.
A provision that limits dropping off absentee ballots. SB1 cements into law a state policy requiring voters who deliver absentee ballots in person to do so by giving them to an election official, who attests that the voter provided their name, signature, and identification when delivering their ballot. *
New requirements for anyone who provides transportation to more than seven voters using curbside voting. These drivers must submit their personal information and authorization for providing such transportation to the government.*
Provisions restricting providing assistance to voters casting a ballot at the polls and completing absentee ballots. Those providing assistance at the polls must fill out a form with an oath affirming the voter is qualified to receive help. Those helping voters with their absentee ballot must provide information about their relationship to the voter and whether they are being paid.
An exception to an employer’s obligation to give employees time off to vote. When polls are open for two consecutive hours outside an employee’s work schedule, the law stipulates that their employer is not required to give them leave. *
Provisions that expand poll watchers’ access. The law limits election workers’ ability to remove those poll watchers “who intimidate voters or otherwise interfere with the voting counting processes,” the lawsuit says.

Some decisions reached before trial

Senate Bill 1 created new requirements for Texans who qualify to vote by mail. They are now required to provide either a driver’s license number or the last four digits of their Social Security number on their absentee ballot application and the envelope used to return their completed ballot, whichever matches the number the state has in its voter registration file. Last month, Judge Rodriguez, who is overseeing the trial, said that provision is illegal, though it remains in effect pending an injunction. More evidence against the provision will be heard at trial.

For voters who qualify to vote by mail — elderly voters, voters with disabilities, college students living away from home or any voter who isn’t in the county at the time of the election — the ID requirements have added barriers to having their votes counted, said Zachary Dolling, senior staff attorney for the voting rights program at the Texas Civil Rights Project and who represents OCA-Greater Houston, a chapter of the OCA-Asian Pacific American Advocates, as plaintiffs challenging that provision.

Months after the law went into effect, 24,000 voters who tried to vote by mail in the March 2022 primary had their ballots rejected due to the new ID mandates.

“These ID-matching provisions throw out votes on the basis of immaterial irrelevant paperwork. Errors that have nothing to do with whether the person is an eligible voter,” Dolling said. “The other plaintiffs’ groups will be able to show at trial that the burden of these mail ballot rejections falls disproportionately on people of color, as well.”

Last year, a provision restricting assistance at the polls for voters with disabilities and limited English language proficiency was permanently blocked in a separate lawsuit after a judge found it violated the Voting Rights Act. That provision is now no longer in effect and thus, won’t be part of this trial.

The law also added ballot security requirements to the election administration process in the state, including a mandate for elections administrators in counties with a population of more than 100,000 people to provide 24-hour video surveillance of any area of the election office that contains voted ballots, including the room where the votes are counted on election night. Taxpayers in those counties footed the bill for costs associated with the new rules. This provision isn’t being challenged in court.

The Texas Attorney General’s office is representing the state.

In a pretrial order filed by the parties last week, the office said the law was enacted to prevent fraud, promote voter access, and to make the conduct of elections in Texas uniform throughout the state. None of the challenged provisions created a racially disparate impact, the state maintains, and no challenged provision “blocks or seriously hinders voting by members of any minority group.”

The attorney general’s office did not respond to a request for comment.

Among the list of plaintiffs are organizations advocating for Latino, Black, and Asian-American voters: the Southwest Voter Education Project, the League of United Latin American Citizens, OCA – Asian Pacific American Advocates, and REV UP Texas, which advocates for voters with disabilities, among others. Among the named defendants in the case are Texas Secretary of State Jane Nelson and interim Texas Attorney General Angela Colmenero.

To support their claims, the parties will call a total of 52 witnesses over the next month, including county election administrators from across the state, voters, Republican and Democratic lawmakers, representatives of the Texas secretary of state, and experts in political science and voting rights.

Whatever happens in the trial, SB 1 is far from the Legislature’s last word on the state’s elections. This year, legislators proposed more than 100 new laws, some of which passed. One that abolished the elections administration department in Harris County is now being disputed in court.

*Corrections, Sept. 14, 2023: This article incorrectly reported some information about SB 1’s provisions. SB 1 did not ban absentee ballot drop boxes. In fact, the law codified rules for in-person delivery of absentee ballots to election workers at drop-off locations.

The law did not set new requirements for people driving more than seven voters to the polls. New requirements apply only if voters use the curbside-voting option.

The law did not eliminate an employer’s obligation to let employees take time off to vote. The law provides an exception under some circumstances.

Natalia Contreras covers election administration and voting access for Votebeat in partnership with the Texas Tribune. Contact Natalia at ncontreras@votebeat.org

New law requires many Texas counties to add more polling places. In areas with few buildings and workers, that’s going to be hard.

2023-08-31T19:18:36+00:00

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

A new Texas law requiring more Election Day polling sites in several counties next year has officials worried they won’t be able to find enough voting locations or workers to staff them.

The mandate, which was approved earlier this year by Republican lawmakers, applies only to the roughly 90 counties that use the countywide voting program. Counties voluntarily adopt the program, which allows voters to cast ballots at any polling place while also permitting counties to consolidate the number of voting locations offered, since voters can go to any of them.

But the new law changes that, in some cases drastically expanding the number of voting sites counties in the program must open while still permitting voters to cast a ballot at any location.

In Brazos County, for example, which uses the countywide polling program, the provision will require the county to double the number of polling locations it currently offers on Election Day. That means Elections Administrator Trudy Hancock and her staff must find 25 new sites — along with equipment, supplies, and staff needed by next year’s November general election, she said.

Update, Jan. 2024: Some Texas counties struggle to meet new law’s demand for more polling places

Brazos, which has more than 125,000 registered voters and is home to Texas A&M University, has been using the countywide voting program since 2014. It gave Hancock a way to centralize voting across lots of precincts that — due to redistricting quirks — have fewer than 500 voters, including some precincts with only 10 voters and even some with just a single voter each. She would typically locate a combined single polling site to serve several of them in a high-traffic area with an available building, one accessible for voters with disabilities.

Hancock is worried especially about finding adequate polling locations.

“Most of our population is highly concentrated. We’re a college town. Everything that’s rural around us is all farmland,” Hancock said. “So there are very few people in those precincts and it’s just not feasible to have locations in those places. Most of them don’t even have buildings in the whole precinct because it’s all farmland.”

And all locations must comply with the Americans with Disabilities Act while also offering enough secure space for multiple rows of voting equipment, along with plenty of parking to accommodate the anticipated number of voters.

Combining polling sites made it easier to find enough good locations, while also saving the county money because it allowed election officials to staff and equip one polling location to serve voters from more than one precinct.

“But now [legislators] took that ability from us,” she said.

That wasn’t the original intent of Senate Bill 924, authored by state Sen. Drew Springer, a rural North Texas Republican. As originally written, Springer’s bill gives smaller counties that aren’t in the countywide voting program the option to combine precincts. Lawmakers didn’t change that part. Those counties can now group precincts together, as long as such combinations don’t grow to more than 10,000 registered voters — double what was previously allowed.

In the bill’s House Election Committee report, Springer gave an example in Denton County — which does not use countywide voting — where a precinct comprising a pair of retirement communities had grown so large, it forced a split into two different precincts. One of those precincts, however, did not have an adequate facility for a polling location. Springer said those residents “would be better served if two voting precincts could be combined” so that one centralized facility could be used as a polling location.

Then, state Rep. John Bucy, an Austin Democrat, introduced a last-minute amendment on the House floor in May that changes the way counties using the countywide voting program must calculate the number of voting sites they offer, forcing the minimum number of sites higher.

Bucy told Votebeat the purpose of his amendment was to protect voting access and prevent the loss of more voting locations.

“In a state that’s already the hardest to vote, I didn’t want to see access to the ballot box shrink even more,” he said and acknowledged that some counties have a hard time finding adequate polling locations and the workers to run them. But he did not remember receiving any pushback on his amendment during the legislative session, he said.

“We’ll see how it goes,” Bucy said. “And we’ll continue to be open to adjusting [legislation] as we always need to be and as we see unintended consequences of legislation.”

The Legislature passed the bill solely on Republican votes in both chambers, with Bucy voting against the bill in the end. The law does not provide any type of additional funding for counties to pay additional election workers or to pay for expenses associated with finding new locations. If counties do not provide the additional locations or otherwise fail to comply with the new rules, they could be sued by candidates or advocacy groups.

Lawmakers passed the countywide polling program option in 2005. Lubbock County, which has more than 186,000 registered voters, was the first county to use it in 2006. Roxzine Stinson, Lubbock County’s elections administrator, said she may not have a hard time finding enough locations, but worries she won’t be able to recruit sufficient workers to staff them, which could ultimately cause longer wait times for voters.

Stinson said the new law means she’ll need to staff about a dozen additional polling locations, for a total of 49.

“That means we need 49 judges, 49 alternate judges, and then we need clerks for all of those as well. You’re talking quite a bit of people you’re going to need to work,” Stinson said.

Stinson said she and her staff are working to recruit workers by placing flyers at the local county fair and nearby schools, reaching out to temporary job recruiting agencies, making announcements in local radio and TV stations, and by working with local political party chairs to spread the word.

“We’re doing the best that we can with what we have,” she said. “And we will make every effort to make sure we comply and we will go above and beyond to make sure these locations are accessible for the voters.”

The restrictions the new law has imposed on the countywide program are prompting some counties to hesitate, questioning whether adopting it would still be cost-effective and more efficient for voters.

Cameron County, in South Texas and home to Brownsville, has more than 227,000 registered voters. County officials there have been considering adopting the countywide polling place program for a few years now.

In November, the county had more than 70 polling locations. Adopting countywide voting would have previously allowed them to bring that number down to less than 50, at more centralized locations. But under the new law, that may no longer be the case, said Remi Garza, the county’s elections administrator. County officials there are looking closely at the new requirements from Senate Bill 924 before deciding.

“The ultimate benefit of the voter being able to go to any polling place will always stay in effect. But when you talk about the equipment that’s necessary, when you think of the actual number of locations that you will be required to have open — what we believe we’re going to be able to do now, we may ultimately not be able to do,” Garza said.

Natalia Contreras covers election administration and voting access for Votebeat in partnership with the Texas Tribune. Contact Natalia at ncontreras@votebeat.org

People leaving prisons in Michigan would get information on how to register to vote under proposed bill

2023-08-24T16:27:55+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.

It’s been nearly a decade since Vince King cast his first vote, and that act of filling out a ballot still resonates with him.

“Imagine what it’s like for a person who has never done it,” King recalls. “It made me feel free and part of the process.”

King hadn’t voted before his federal drug crime conviction put him behind bars, but when he did, “it made me feel proud,” said King, 55. It was a big deal to him when he put on his “I Voted” sticker.

Update: Michigan will automatically register people to vote when leaving prison

Now a peer counselor for the social services group Detroit Rescue Mission Ministries, King wants other people previously convicted of felonies to vote. He’s hoping new legislation aimed at helping people on parole to register will enable more of them to become voters.

House Bill 4534 would require the Michigan Department of Corrections to provide both identification and information about voter registration to people who have been convicted of felonies upon their release from prison.

An estimated 6,500 people incarcerated in Michigan’s prison system are expected to be released this year, according to the Department of Corrections, and 95% of them will be released on parole. The system has a total of 32,816 people currently imprisoned.

If passed by the state Legislature, the bill will help newly released people join 8 million other Michigan residents who regularly vote by equipping them with identification and preparing them to make decisions at the ballot box that could impact their lives.

“When you learn about politics and how it impacts your life, you go out and vote,” said King.

In Michigan, unlike many other states, those who have served their sentences immediately have their voting rights restored upon release.

State Rep. Erin Byrnes, one of HB 4534’s sponsors and a Democrat who represents the southeast Michigan district that includes Dearborn, said the legislation is hugely important for those getting out of prison because many don’t know they have the right to vote upon release.

“They will get the opportunity to cast their vote for people who are making decisions on the justice system,” said Byrnes, who previously taught in a Michigan women’s prison.

Byrnes said she feels optimistic about the bill’s prospects. It has drawn no public opposition, though lawmakers have yet to schedule a hearing on it.

Michigan Department of Corrections spokesman Kyle Kaminski says the state’s prison system already has a “robust” program of preparing imprisoned people for re-entry back into their communities, including providing them with identification, such as birth certificates, Social Security cards, state identification, and military service records for veterans. But the department does not currently provide voter registration information, Kaminski said.

Byrnes hopes to win support for the bill because of its “empowering” effect on would-be voters.

“Michigan is leading the way in voting rights, and this is an area that we can grow in,” said Byrnes.

Uneven landscape for post-incarceration voting rights

Nicole Porter, senior director of advocacy for the Washington, D.C.-based Sentencing Project, whose goal is to end mass incarceration through research and advocacy, said many previously incarcerated people wrongly believe they have lost the right to vote even after serving their time.

“People don’t understand that they have the right to vote,” said Porter. “It’s certainly a move in the right direction for Michigan to introduce this legislation.”

And while formerly incarcerated people in Michigan have their voting rights automatically restored once they walk out of prison, that is not the case in 25 other states, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures.

In some cases, formerly incarcerated people in Florida are not able to vote unless they receive a pardon from the governor or clemency from the clemency board, said Porter. In 2018, Florida voters passed an amendment to the state’s constitution that automatically restores voting rights to individuals who were formerly incarcerated after they have completed the terms of their sentence, including completing parole, probation and payment of fines and fees. But advocates and observers say implementation of Amendment 4 has been beset by problems including bureaucratic bottlenecks of old records standing in the path of getting back voting rights.

“These are people living in the community, paying taxes, expected to be good neighbors following the completion of a sentence, and yet they are denied the right to vote,” said Porter.

In Tennessee, people seeking to have their voting rights reinstated must submit a formal petition. The state’s process requires fines and fees to be fully paid off, including court debt and child support arrears, Porter said.

In Mississippi, convictions of certain felonies, including theft of timber, carry a penalty of lifetime disenfranchisement. Upon release, a person convicted of such a felony and wishing to vote must ask a state lawmaker to introduce legislation to restore his or her individual voting rights, and get two-thirds of the Senate to approve the bill.

Critics of the Mississippi law say it was designed to permanently disenfranchise Black people who, the architects of the law believed, were more likely to commit certain felonies. This month a panel of judges from the 5th Circuit Court of Appeals struck down the law but the state plans to appeal the court’s ruling.

Alabama and Virginia still have lifetime disenfranchisement of voting rights for those convicted of felonies including murder, kidnapping, rape, and property crimes.

According to the Sentencing Project, more than one in 10 Black adults in eight states have lost their voting rights: Alabama, Arizona, Florida, Kentucky, Mississippi, South Dakota, Tennessee, and Virginia.

Two states, Maine and Vermont, along with the District of Columbia and the U.S. territory of Puerto Rico, allow people to vote while in prison.

Liz Avore, senior advisor to the Voting Rights Lab, applauds Michigan lawmakers for introducing HB 4534, saying it is important for formerly incarcerated people to have access to good information about voting as they rejoin their communities, and legislation like it has drawn bipartisan support elsewhere.

But the laws re-enfranchising people previously incarcerated for felonies might not necessarily be translating into more voter participation, Avore says.

Thelonious Searcy and his wife, Tyria, at United Kingdom Church’s Welcome Home service for exonerees in July. Searcy was released from prison after he was exonerated in April 2021.

“A lot of times when we see these changes made, we’re not seeing the corresponding increase in numbers of voters taking advantage of their new eligibility,” she said. “There’s a lot of legislation like this bill in Michigan attempting to remedy that by educating people about when they are able to vote, and about how to do it, and to, kind of, demystify the process around voter registration.”

For Thelonious Searcy, who was exonerated in April 2021 for a 2004 murder on Detroit’s east side, House Bill 4534 could put a lot of people previously convicted of felonies on the path to becoming active voters, something many of them wished for while they were serving their sentences.

“We watched a lot of politics when we were behind bars,” said Searcy, 43. “Once you get in a situation like ours, you say, ‘I want to vote for someone who’s going to bring forth change.’ Just because we’re in prison, it impacts us too.”

Searcy says he is looking forward to voting in next year’s general election.

“Next year I will be voting. I will be voting,” said Searcy. “Before I went to prison I didn’t vote. I left the streets at the age of 24 and I had never voted before.”

Oralandar Brand-Williams is a senior reporter for Votebeat in partnership with Bridge Michigan. Contact Oralandar at obrand-williams@votebeat.org.

Michigan lawmakers give local clerks “flexibility” for new early in-person voting under Prop 2

2023-06-14T22:28:35+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.

This article has been updated to reflect the bills’ passage through the full House and Senate.

Voting in Michigan is about to undergo unprecedented changes, and among those changes will be the option of at least nine days of in-person early voting.

What that looks like to voters will depend on where in the state they live.

The House and Senate both passed legislation Wednesday that lays out how it will work, leaving it to municipal and county governments to decide the exact number of early voting days and the number of polling places.

In Detroit, for example, voters will be able to vote in person up to three weeks before Election Day at locations across the city.

In Hillsdale County, on Michigan’s southern border, voters will be able to vote in person only during the minimum required nine days before the election. The county is currently planning one early polling place, at the county offices.

Early voting is the centerpiece of a series of landmark changes to elections that legislators are putting into place after the passage of ballot Proposal 2 last November. A package of eight bills Democrats introduced last week is now moving through the full House and Senate.

Republican state Sen. Ed McBroom, representing the 38th Senate District, broke with his political party and is the lone Republican co-sponsor of the early voting bill.

“We’re writing a historic new chapter for voting in the state of Michigan,” Democratic state Sen. Jeremy Moss, who chairs the Senate’s committee on elections and ethics, said in a hearing introducing his bills last week.

“It’s a reminder to all of us that, as Michigan faced some of the most intense scrutiny in the nation over the last couple of years, voting rights remain popular here in Michigan,” he added.

In the past, Michigan voters could vote early only through an absentee ballot, including an option to request and fill out an absentee ballot during an in-person visit to a local clerk’s office, but the ballots were then set aside to be counted on Election Day. Under the early voting bill, polling places will be open at least eight hours a day, over a minimum of nine consecutive days, and voters will cast their ballot into a tabulator to be counted on site, just as they do on Election Day.

The other bills for implementing Prop 2 allow Michigan voters to place themselves on a permanent list to automatically receive an absentee ballot every election, and mandate drop boxes and a tracking system for absentee ballots.

State Sen. Ruth Johnson, a Republican who is also a former Michigan secretary of state, voted against the early voting bill, objecting to the freedom the bill gives clerks to expand the option beyond the required nine days.

She explained during last week’s hearing that one township may decide to run early voting for nine days while a clerk elsewhere could provide up to 29 days.

“I don’t believe it’s equal access,” said Johnson. She and McBroom are the only two Republicans on the committee, and she was the only vote against the early voting legislation. In announcing her votes against many bills Tuesday, including the early voting bill, Johnson said, “I feel that the legislation goes well beyond the mandates of Proposal 2 and further weakens the integrity of our elections. The bills also allow the secretary of state to wield unprecedented power to set procedures for early voting without going through the formal rule-making process.”

On Wednesday, Michigan House Republicans criticized the Democrats’ bills on Twitter, writing, “Democrats are trying to fundamentally change our elections today, going much further than what Prop 2 intended in order to benefit their prospects. House Republicans will continue to FIGHT this.”

Democratic state Rep. Penelope Tsernoglou, the chair of the House Elections and Ethics Committee, said the framework for implementing early voting in her bill, HB 4567, allows for “much needed flexibility for our clerks and at the same time giving Michigan voters unprecedented access to in-person voting.”

Local clerks in Michigan’s cities and townships would have three options for conducting early voting:

Create their own plan for setting up and staffing early voting in their municipality.
Conduct early voting with one or more neighboring communities in the same county under a municipal agreement in which they share staff, voting equipment, and other resources
Enter into a county agreement and let the county clerk arrange the early voting for their area.

Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson testified last week that the early voting bill and other voting legislation will “carry out the will of the voters” after Prop 2 passed in November with 60 percent approval.

“They are and reflect national best practices that have bipartisan support, from Kentucky to Minnesota and everywhere else … Michigan as well, of course, endorsed these policies by a wide margin last year,” added Benson, a Democrat.

Erica Peresman, a lawyer and senior advisor for Promote the Vote, which led the drive for Prop 2, said the bills represent “a road map,” and a one-size-fits-all proposition wouldn’t have worked for the state. This way, Peresman said, municipalities have flexibility.

Ever since Proposal 2 passed in November, local clerks have been looking for answers about how they should conduct early voting and how to pay for it. It’s still unclear how local governments are expected to cover the costs and what funding help they’ll get from the state. The Prop 2 bills don’t include any funding for the voting expansions, and Benson has previously put the costs at up to $45 million, with $10 million to $15 million in local funding needed for early voting.

Saginaw County Clerk Vanessa Guerra, who spoke at both of last week’s Senate and House committee hearings, said she already is preparing her office for early voting, which could begin in most municipalities with the presidential primary in February, but she can’t convince her county officials to commit to any funding until the new bills become law.

Hillsdale County Chief Deputy Clerk Abe Dane met recently with clerks in his county and has been putting his plan together.

“The clock is ticking,” Dane told Votebeat Michigan.

So far he said he’s planning for Hillsdale’s 28 precincts to share one voting site for nine days of early voting, likely at the county courthouse, though he said he’s still in talks with one clerk and that could change depending on the details of the legislation that ultimately passes and depending on guidance from the state.

That arrangement would cost the county less than $1,000 per precinct, Dane said. He’s hoping county and state funds will pay for the early voting.

“It’s about saving money,” said Dane. “It’s really expensive.”

In Detroit, elections officials plan to offer three weeks of early voting, said Dan Baxter, the Department of Elections’ chief operating officer for absentee voting and special projects.

“We shouldn’t have any problem implementing early voting in the city of Detroit,” Baxter told Votebeat Michigan. “We’ve been operating 12 satellite voting centers, so now early voting is just a switch.”

Satellite offices, which the city has provided since 2012, are where voters previously could cast in-person absentee ballots, and Baxter said they’ve been popular.

Detroit has 500,000 registered voters, and Baxter said “we’re hoping with early voting that folks see it as a viable option.”

Baxter said he did not have figures yet on how much it will cost to offer the three weeks of early voting. Like other election officials across Michigan, Baxter is keeping his eyes turned toward Lansing to see whether the state will budget more funding for local election departments.

On Thursday, the voting-rights advocacy organization Voters Not Politicians appealed to volunteers to help support efforts to get funding to put the voting reforms into effect.

“Our team of staff and volunteers interviewed 35 municipal election clerks across the state and these clerks overwhelmingly stressed the need for appropriate funding in order to carry out the 2024 election. Michigan’s 1,603 election jurisdictions depend on the legislature to fund the expanded voting access that they are constitutionally required to provide,” VNP wrote in its newsletter appeal

Detroit resident and longtime voter Veronica Armstead still isn’t sure she will take part in early voting herself, because she prefers to vote on Election Day, but she likes the flexibility it gives voters.

“I’m glad the option is here. I might consider it down the road,” said Armstead, a retired 66-year-old state government staffer.

Also on Tuesday, Moss introduced two bills, SB 386 and SB 387, to preprocess and tabulate absentee ballots prior to Election Day. Results could not be generated before the close of the polls at 8 p.m. Election Day.

For municipalities with more than 5,000 residents, clerks will be able to preprocess eight days before Election Day. In communities with fewer residents, clerks will be able to begin preprocessing and tabulating absentee ballots beginning at 7 a.m. on Monday before Election Day. In the past, election officials had to wait until Election Day itself to begin processing absentee ballots, which has slowed down reporting results and created dramatic shifts in vote tallies as absentee voting results were added into the totals after the in-person votes.

Moss said the legislation could have tremendous benefits.

“One of the biggest challenges for election administrators and quite frankly one of the biggest election policy failures of the last couple of years was the inaction from the Legislature to manage the record number of absent voter ballots submitted,” said Moss Tuesday. “We know that this was one of the largest contributors to misinformation in 2020 that rose to national attention.”

Former Michigan elections director Chris Thomas, a consultant for the City of Detroit’s Department of Elections, testified Tuesday in support of Moss’s bills, calling them “a great step forward for election administration.”

Thomas said early processing and tabulation of absentee ballots could cut down on a huge logjam at counting boards, as seen in bigger cities like Detroit. Thomas said instead of 140 counting tables, the new legislation could cut Detroit’s number of tables down to 25.

Oralandar Brand-Williams is a senior reporter for Votebeat. Contact Oralandar at obrand-williams@votebeat.org. This article is made possible through a partnership with Bridge Michigan, Michigan’s largest nonpartisan, nonprofit news publication.

New Texas law gives secretary of state the power to intervene in Harris County elections

2023-06-01T08:50:00+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.

Texas Republicans have muscled through legislation allowing unprecedented state interventions into elections in Harris County, the most populous county in Texas, threatening to drastically overhaul elections in the Democratic stronghold.

The bills targeting Harris, which would eliminate its chief elections official and allow state officials to intervene and supervise the county’s elections in response to administrative complaints, are headed to the governor’s desk.

Lawmakers say they’re responding to repeated election issues in Harris County, which includes the city of Houston. The county, for its part, has signaled it will challenge the bid to remove its elections administrator and is portraying the bills as a partisan power grab and the latest in a series of legislative moves by Texas Republicans to tighten access to the ballot in the wake of the 2020 presidential election.

Some election and policy experts say the moves set a bad precedent, mirror strategies recently used by GOP-led legislatures in Florida and Georgia to gain control of local elections, and could signal state lawmakers’ intention to seek control in counties beyond Harris. The continual changes to elections administration in Texas, which intensified in 2021 with the sweeping voting bill Senate Bill 1, could also foster public distrust, said Daniel Griffith, senior policy director at Secure Democracy USA.

“Election administration should really be something that’s stable and something that people can rely on,” Griffith said.

Instead, the bills represent the latest battle in the partisan war over how elections should be run in Texas, and who should oversee them.

Senate Bill 1933, authored by state Sen. Paul Bettencourt, a Harris County Republican, grants the Texas secretary of state the authority to investigate election “irregularities” after complaints are filed — but only in counties with more than 4 million people, which means just Harris County.

The office, which until now has had less authority than nearly any other state’s chief election authority, will be able to remove a county election administrator or to file a petition to remove an elected county officer overseeing elections, such as a county clerk, if “a recurring pattern of problems” isn’t resolved.

After the measure goes into effect in September, administrative election complaints that are filed with the secretary of state’s Elections Division, led by Christina Adkins, can trigger an investigation.

Examples of recurring problems that could trigger state oversight include:

Malfunction of voting system equipment that prevents a voter from casting a vote.
Carelessness or official misconduct in the distribution of election supplies.
Errors in the tabulation of results that would have affected the outcome of an election.
Failure to meet deadlines for reporting election results.
Discovery of properly executed voted ballots after the canvass of an election that were not counted.
Failure to conduct maintenance activities on the lists of registered voters as required under the Texas Election Code.

State officials must conduct an investigation, but if they find “good cause to believe” there is a “recurring pattern of problems,” Adkins could then order state oversight of Harris County’s elections. The secretary of state’s Elections Division could then have personnel on the ground, observing any activities related to election preparation, early voting, election day, and post-election day procedures.

The state’s oversight can last for up to two years or until the office determines the “recurring pattern of problems” has been resolved.

If such problems aren’t resolved, the secretary of state could then get rid of Harris County election officials, though a second bill passed by Republicans, Senate Bill 1750, could make that more complex. That bill removes Harris County’s elections administrator position, reshaping how the county oversees elections.

That law also goes into effect in September — only months before Harris’ municipal election. It will transfer election duties back to the county clerk and tax assessor-collector’s office. To remove an elected official such as the county clerk, the secretary of state would have to request the removal, but the final decision would be determined through a jury trial.

Last week, Harris County Attorney Christian Menefee said the county was preparing to sue the state over the new measures.

“The Texas Constitution is clear: The Legislature can’t pass laws that target one specific city or one specific county,” Menefee said.

County Judge Lina Hidalgo tweeted Sunday that legislators in Texas “are still trying to disenfranchise 4.7 million of their own constituents by taking over elections in Harris County. This fight is far from over,” she said. “This is a shameless power grab and dangerous precedent.”

Last November, Harris County had to extend voting for an hour after various polling places had malfunctioning voting machines, paper ballot shortages, and long waiting periods. More than 20 lawsuits from losing Republican candidates have been filed against the county, citing those problems and seeking a redo of the election.

Clifford Tatum, the county’s second elections administrator since the position was created in 2020, was hired only two months before November’s election. At the time, Harris County’s elections department lacked a tracking system used by other large counties to identify issues in real time and for months could not say how many polling locations ran out of paper on Election Day or whether anyone was prevented from voting. A recent investigation by the Houston Chronicle found that out of the more than 782 polling locations, only about 20 ran out of paper.

Bettencourt declared throughout the legislative session that Harris County’s election problems in the past year were the “genesis” of his proposals. Bettencourt has denied the pieces of legislation are political in nature and called the passage of his bills a “victory.” He said in a tweet Sunday that the legislation means “the problems of the defunct Harris County Elections Administrator should be a thing of the past!”

Initially introduced as a measure that would allow the secretary of state to randomly select small counties to conduct election audits, Senate Bill 1933 was amended multiple times during the session as part of a slew of Republican-led measures aimed at scrutinizing and supervising Harris County’s elections.

Weeks later, when the bill made it to the House chamber, it was amended behind closed doors and without any public input until it eventually affected only counties with a population of more than 4 million residents, meaning only Harris County.

Katya Ehresman, voting rights program director with Common Cause Texas, said voters, county officials, and election administrators should have been given the opportunity to testify about legislation set to directly impact them.

Ehresman said that process was concerning and “against values of transparency and public input, which should be core parts of the legislative process.”

Another state election oversight bill proposed by Bettencourt died in the House after it didn’t meet key deadlines. Senate Bill 1039 would have allowed the secretary of state, following a complaint of election “irregularities,” to appoint a conservator to oversee elections in a county when violations of the Election Code were identified.

On Monday, Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick sent a letter to Gov. Greg Abbott asking him to consider potentially reviving SB 1039 in a special session in the coming months.

Griffith said if that bill is revived, it could be a way for the Legislature to exert election oversight over all counties instead of just in Harris.

Voting rights activists say the approved bills could threaten Texas counties’ ability to maintain a nonpartisan election process.

“These bills do have a tangible effect on voter turnout, voter apathy, and on the ability for elections administrators to do their job free from threats and free from partisan pressures,” Ehresman said. “The discourse surrounding Texas election reform continues to be punitive and continues to be rooted in misinformation. And that will have a permanent damage on recruitment [of election workers] and election administration going forward.”

Natalia Contreras covers election administration and voting access for Votebeat in partnership with the Texas Tribune. Contact Natalia at ncontreras@votebeat.org.

Bill in Michigan House would let 16-year-olds kick-start their voter registration early

2023-05-30T17:50:20+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.

Ruth Singleton’s grandmother and great-aunt were in their 80s and 90s when they first registered to vote, motivated by Barack Obama’s campaign. Singleton, of Auburn Hills, was in her mid-20s when she first registered.

She hopes her daughter Nya, 16, won’t wait as long.

A bill in the Michigan legislature could give Nya her chance soon. The proposal would allow 16-year-olds to preregister to vote. Then they are automatically eligible to cast a ballot on the very day they turn 18. Currently in Michigan, only teens who are 17½ can preregister.

Supporters of the bill say lowering the age for preregistration (which does not allow people under 18 to actually vote) prepares young adults to participate sooner and more actively in democracy. Election officials say it also eases the registration process later, enabling smoother voting overall.

State Rep. Betsy Coffia (D-Traverse City) introduced House Bill 4569 last week during a House Elections Committee hearing. Coffia said local clerks encouraged her to introduce the measure and she believes pre-registration of younger teens will “increase the likelihood” of more “robust” participation of young people in elections over time.

Fifteen states and the District of Columbia already allow the preregistration of 16-year-olds, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures.

Coffia said 16 is a good age to get pre-registered because it’s when teens typically take on “significant” legal responsibilities, such as getting a driver’s license, and is when their civics or government studies classes can give students a “newfound enthusiasm” for the democratic process.

“It can help increase voter turnout in our state,” said Coffia during the hearing.

Michigan had the highest rate of young voters during the November 2022 election, according to the Michigan Secretary of State’s Office: 37 percent of voters 18-29 cast ballots, compared with 23 percent nationwide. Young voters historically are more likely to vote for Democrats, research shows.

But there are also younger Michigan residents who are not engaged in voting even when they turn 18 because they are “uninformed … disengaged or for another reason,” Coffia said.

Nya Singleton, a sophomore at Lake Orion High School, said she and her classmates view voting as a way to make needed social and political changes on issues such as Black Lives Matter and women’s rights.

“They want to be able to voice their opinion and have it be beneficial to their lives,” Nya said of her classmates. “Having a vote can impact their lives and their families.”

Democratic state Rep. Matt Koleszar, a former teacher who represents part of northwestern Wayne County, said that if the bill becomes law, it will have significant returns for democracy.

“The [Advanced Placement] government teacher in me loves every part of this right now, “ said Koleszar. “It’s getting the youngest voting block engaged early.”

Koleszar added that when the school where he worked held registration events, “we would find a pretty long line of 17½-year-olds.”

Canton Township Clerk Michael Siegrist, was among several clerks testifying Tuesday in support of the bill. Siegrist said age 16 is an ideal opportunity to get a future voter entered into the registration system, calling it “super convenient,” because it’s when they’re getting processed for a driver’s license and it’s efficient to transfer their official, verified personal information into their voter registration while they’re at the Secretary of State office. Otherwise, they might not get the same convenience until they return to get a new license at 21.

“So there’s people in that little window to get registered,” Siegrist told Votebeat in an interview. “We’ve been putting a lot of energy and effort into trying to do voter registration drives at the high schools to get these folks registered when they’re 17½, so that they are registered for the next election.”

Interim East Lansing City Clerk Marie Wicks said the bill could potentially eliminate the extremely long polling place waits Michigan college students experienced on Election Day last November. Throngs of voters at the campuses of University of Michigan and Michigan State stood in line for hours, stretching in the wee hours of morning due to high turnout and on-site voter registration for some out-of-state students and first-time voters, which takes extra time.

“It would be a huge time saver for us,” said Wicks.

State Rep. Jay DeBoyer, a Republican elections committee member who represents parts of St. Clair and Macomb counties, signaled opposition to the preregistration bill, and the Democrats’ other new election bills, in a statement after the hearing, saying Michigan lawmakers should focus on addressing “concerns” that have arisen in recent elections rather than “moving forward with new proposals that would likely create more questions and further water down our process.” He said he was concerned about “logistics and costs” of preregistration and noted Colorado spent $600,000 to implement a preregistration program in 2013.

Unlike in Colorado, however, Michigan’s preregistration program is already implemented, and because the bill only lowers the eligibility age, clerks and voting experts say they don’t anticipate any additional costs. DeBoyer did not respond to Votebeat’s request for comment.

Peter de Guzman, an associate researcher on young voter turnout at Tufts University’s Center for Information & Research on Civic Learning and Engagement, explained how the current process would accommodate younger teens who preregister.

“They fill out the same form as another eligible voter and then they are marked as pending on the voter file until they become eligible … until the date passes when they are 18,” de Guzman said. “I don’t expect it to be costly.”

Studies have shown that allowing 16-years-old to preregister can have major benefits, said Joshua Douglas, a professor at the University of Kentucky’s law school who also serves on the advisory board for the advocacy organization Vote16 USA.

“The evidence we have from the states that have done that demonstrates that voter turnout among young people does increase,” said Douglas, an expert on election law. “But I think there’s even an intangible effect as well, not just on turnout but on starting the conversation about voting and civics education earlier.”

Douglas added: “The key here is to break down barriers to turnout.”

Ruth Singleton said the change could help ensure young people like her daughter register before they turn 18, a busy time in life when they are barraged with other commitments, such as preparing for college.

She hopes the bill passes because it will get more young people looking forward to voting.

“Voting really shapes the world,” Singleton said.

Illegal voting set to become a felony again in Texas, but only if unlawful intent can be proved

2023-05-28T02:43:19+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.

Texas legislators reached agreement Saturday on a bill to raise the penalty for illegal voting from a misdemeanor to a second-degree felony, finding a compromise that will prevent ineligible voters from being prosecuted for mistakenly casting a ballot. A person convicted of an attempt to vote illegally would be subject to a state jail felony.

A 10-lawmaker conference committee resolved the differences between the House and Senate versions of House Bill 1243 on Saturday, after the House rejected last-minute language Sen. Bryan Hughes had added that would have allowed prosecutors to charge a voter who had unintentionally cast an illegal ballot.

The agreement means the bill will almost certainly win final approval in both chambers and be sent to the governor.

Adjusting the penalty for illegal voting has been a priority for Texas Republican leaders since 2021, when the Legislature downgraded illegal voting from a second-degree felony to a Class A misdemeanor as part of an omnibus voting bill. Few noticed the change until after the session ended, and several bills to readjust the penalty were filed this year despite the lack of evidence of widespread voter fraud in Texas.

“The Legislature lowered this penalty less than two years ago. In that time, we have not seen this crime increase, as evidenced by the lack of charges or convictions,” said Rep. John Bucy, D-Austin, who served on the conference committee but chose not to sign the conference report. “While I am glad the protections for innocent mistakes are still intact, which was not the case in the Senate version, there is no need to raise the penalty now.”

A second-degree felony is punishable by two to 20 years in prison, while a Class A misdemeanor can be punished with up to one year in jail.

The lowered penalties were the 2021 brainchild of Rep. Steve Allison, a Republican from San Antonio who at the time said Attorney General Ken Paxton had recommended the change. Paxton disputed this.

Katya Ehresman with Common Cause Texas said the 2021 change was lauded by those who were concerned that the many changes to the voting process that year could lead confused voters to make innocent mistakes, and that felony penalties seemed inappropriate. The compromise reached Saturday, which must be approved by the House and Senate, would reverse that change.

“Unlawful voting is already a very serious crime in Texas that can send someone to jail for up to a year. This penalty is more than sufficient to deter voter fraud, which remains almost nonexistent in Texas,” said James Slattery, senior staff attorney at the Texas Civil Rights Project. “The only effect raising the penalty for illegal voting will have is to make voting even scarier in Texas than it already is.”

Hughes’ amendment to remove the current law’s “intent requirement,” which he pushed through this week, was unlikely to receive a warm welcome in the House, where Hughes’ bill with the same language, Senate Bill 2, died last week after failing to meet a key deadline.

The law says a person commits a crime if they “knowingly or intentionally” vote or attempt to vote in an election in which the person “knows they’re not eligible” to vote. According to the secretary of state’s office, to be eligible to vote in Texas, someone must be:

A U.S. citizen.
A resident of the county in which they intend to vote.
At least 18 years old. (People may register at 17 years and 10 months.)
Not convicted of a felony (unless their sentence is completed, including any probation or parole).
Not declared mentally incompetent by a court.
Registered 30 days before the election in which they plan to vote.

Some voting rights advocates have said that the bill’s purpose is to intimidate voters — especially voters who have been previously incarcerated.

The effort to raise the penalty also came after a Tarrant County woman was given a five-year prison sentence for voting illegally in 2016, gaining national attention.

Crystal Mason cast a provisional ballot while on supervised release from a federal conviction and later said she did not know she was ineligible to vote. Election safeguards prevented the vote from being counted. When Mason was charged, the offense was a second-degree state felony. Because she didn’t know she was ineligible to vote, the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals directed a lower appeals court to reconsider the case. The outcome of the appeal is still pending.

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

Texas is set to make illegal voting a felony again. This is how some voters could be at risk.

2023-05-25T01:32:10+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.

The Texas Senate on Wednesday got closer to raising the penalty for voting illegally from a misdemeanor to a felony, as well as making it easier to convict a voter without proving they intended to cast an illegal ballot.

The legislation is a priority for Texas Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick and other Republican lawmakers who have pushed for it since the 2021 change lowering the penalty to a misdemeanor, despite no evidence of widespread voter fraud in Texas.

Known as House Bill 1243, it was approved by the Senate on a 19–11 vote without debate. The proposal initially only raised the penalty of illegally casting a ballot from a misdemeanor to a felony.

State Sen. Bryan Hughes, R-Mineola, however, added language this week saying anyone who votes or attempts to vote in an election in which “the person knows of a particular circumstance that makes the person not eligible to vote” could be prosecuted.

The addition by Hughes means the bill must now go back to the House, where it faces an uncertain path. Another piece of legislation, Senate Bill 2, contained the same language Hughes has now inserted into this bill. SB 2 died in the House after it did not meet a key deadline.

The law currently requires prosecutors to prove the person intended to cast an illegal ballot, a high hurdle. The change would eliminate that intent requirement and leave someone vulnerable to prosecution for an innocent misunderstanding. That means, for example, that a person who knows they have been convicted of a felony but doesn’t realize that makes them ineligible to vote, or a person who knows they are not a U.S. citizen but does not know that makes them ineligible to cast a ballot, could be prosecuted if the bill becomes law.

A person found guilty would face up to 20 years in prison and more than $10,000 in fines.

Some voting rights advocates say that given the lack of evidence of widespread voter fraud, the bill’s purpose is to intimidate voters — especially voters who have been previously incarcerated.

“Why increase the penalty? Why this, why now?” said Joyce LeBombard, president of the League of Women Voters of Texas. “This will impact people that are already unsure about whether they should go or vote. They’re potentially not going to vote because of a concern that they might make a mistake.”

Maggie Luna, 42, of Austin, who had been incarcerated on past convictions, voted for the first time in 2020 after she had completed her parole. For years and while behind bars, Luna was told she’d never be able to vote. But after her release, she learned that wasn’t true and that she could, in fact, cast a ballot once her parole was completed. Luna now helps advocate for others who have been incarcerated and helps them to understand their rights through the Texas Center for Justice and Equity.

After her release, Luna struggled to find a stable job and housing due to her felony conviction. That’s why the thought of this bill becoming law “terrifies” her. And she worries that others who have been incarcerated but have regained their eligibility to vote will be deterred from the polls.

“Getting a felony in Texas is for life. You can’t get a job, you can’t apply for housing,” Luna said. “I don’t want to take that chance. People are just not going to take that chance.”

Illegally voting was a second-degree felony in Texas for nearly 50 years. In 2021, lawmakers downgraded the penalty to a Class A misdemeanor, a largely unnoticed part of an omnibus voting bill, Senate Bill 1.

Patrick subsequently said what he described as a “last-minute” change should be corrected, and this year, that made his list of legislative priorities.

According to the Secretary of State’s Office, to be eligible to vote in Texas, someone must be:

A U.S. citizen.
A resident of the county in which they intend to vote.
At least 18 years old. (People may register at 17 years and 10 months.)
Not convicted of a felony (unless their sentence is completed, including any probation or parole).
Not declared mentally incompetent by a court of law.
Registered 30 days before the election in which they plan to vote.

The effort to raise the penalty also comes after the case of a Tarrant County woman given a five-year prison sentence for voting illegally in 2016 rose to national attention.

Crystal Mason cast a provisional ballot while on supervised release from a federal conviction and later said she did not know she was ineligible to vote. Election safeguards prevented the vote from being counted. When Mason was charged, the offense was a second-degree state felony. Since she didn’t know she was ineligible to vote, a filing in the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals asked a lower appeals court to reconsider the case. The outcome of the appeal is still pending.

Texas is already one of the most restrictive and most difficult states in which to vote, as it requires voters to show an identification card at the polls, limits who can vote by mail, and lacks online voter registration. For some immigrant communities, newly naturalized citizens, and those who don’t speak English fluently, increasing the penalty could create additional barriers to the ballot box in a system that is already confusing, advocates say.

For instance, a third of Texans of Asian American and Pacific Islander background are not English proficient, and the vast majority of counties in the state do not offer voter registration forms, voter information, or ballots in Asian languages, said Lily Trieu, interim executive director at Asian Texans for Justice. That language barrier increases their chances of misunderstanding the rules.

“Our community is particularly at risk. We’ve already created a system where if you don’t speak English, it can be even more confusing,” Trieu said. “And when you tell them, ‘Hey, if you mess up, this is now a felony,’ you’re creating an additional hurdle.”

Natalia Contreras covers election administration and voting access for Votebeat in partnership with The Texas Tribune. Contact Natalia at ncontreras@votebeat.org

Texas set to withdraw from ERIC after final legislative approval

2023-05-24T00:09:10+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.

Update, June 1, 2023: The Texas House and Senate approved the final version of the bill during the closing days of the legislative session. It is now headed to the governor’s desk to be signed into law.

The Texas House of Representatives gave crucial approval on Tuesday to a Republican-backed effort rooted in conspiracy theories that would remove the state from a national coalition that helps prevent voter fraud.

Senate Bill 1070, authored by state Sen. Bryan Hughes, was approved by the House on a 85-61 vote. The bill would allow Texas to withdraw from the Electronic Registration Information Center, also known as ERIC, a multistate program used for checking duplicate voter registrations and cleaning voter rolls. The bill is now headed back to the Senate for approval of changes proposed by Rep. John Bucy, D-Austin, that would add requirements to comply with federal and state privacy guidelines if an alternative system is contracted by the state.

ERIC, considered by election administration experts across the country to be the best tool for preventing double voting across state lines, has been a target of viral conspiracy theories spread since early last year by a fringe conservative publication, The Gateway Pundit. The nonpartisan program compares voter registration rolls from all its member states, along with other data, to flag voters who have died, moved away, or registered elsewhere so that states can remove outdated registrations from their rolls.

Rep. Chris Turner, D-Grand Prairie, spoke against the bill Tuesday and said it was concerning to see the Texas Legislature take such action based on a conspiracy theory.

“That’s why I don’t understand why we have this bill before us, particularly when we know the data shows that ERIC has helped Texas identify duplicate registrations, and that’s exactly what we should be trying to do,” Turner said.

Right-wing activists and conservative media have falsely said that the program is led by left-wing activists, that its funding comes from Democratic megadonor George Soros, and that it shares voters’ private data with outside groups seeking to give Democrats an advantage, among other allegations. Since last year, eight Republican-run member states — most recently Virginia — have announced their withdrawals, apparently due to political pressure.

In a written statement to Votebeat, ERIC executive director Shane Hamlin said the program has provided the Texas secretary of state with reports identifying more than 900,000 out-of-date or inaccurate voter records. “Consistent with ERIC’s mission, these reports enhanced Texas’ ability to maintain accurate voter rolls,” Hamlin said Tuesday. “ERIC will continue to support Texas’ active use of its membership.”

In Texas, an “ERIC task force” was created more than a year ago by members of the Texas GOP, ignited by those same viral false claims. The task force was spearheaded by the party’s vice chair, Dana Myers, and Alan Vera, then the Harris County GOP ballot security chair. Vera, an influential activist who spent decades raising questions about voter fraud and is also known for challenging thousands of voter registrations in Harris County, drafted language for a bill and submitted it to Hughes’ staff in January. A month later, Hughes and Rep. Jacey Jetton, R-Richmond, filed bills incorporating the suggestions from Vera and the task force.

Vera died at the Capitol earlier this month, moments before he was scheduled to testify on election legislation. Jetton on Monday renamed SB 1070 “The Alan Vera Memorial Act.”

Texas law requires the state to participate in a multistate data-sharing program to clean its voter rolls, and the state has been a member of ERIC since 2020. The Texas Legislature budgets about $1.5 million to participate in the program. About $115,000 of those funds pay for annual fees to use ERIC’s voter-matching data. The rest of the funds go to paying for postage, mailing, and printing costs to send notices to residents ERIC identifies as eligible voters who are not yet registered, an effort the program requires of its member states.

Members of the ERIC task force argued the state was spending too much money on the program and suggested Texas could instead use private-sector alternatives. Members of the ERIC task force also pushed for the state to stop spending funds on such mailers for eligible voters.

Hughes’ bill directs the secretary of state to build its own version of a multistate cross-check program or to find a “private sector provider” with a cost that won’t exceed $100,000.

In March, the secretary of state announced it was taking steps to build its own version of the program and researching viable options in the private sector. Votebeat reported those efforts could stall or take years.

The bill nonetheless requires such a system to identify voters whose addresses have changed, who have died, or who are ineligible to vote, including because they have been convicted of a felony. Lastly, the bill also requires that a contract with the private sector provider “may not require any additional duty of the state” that isn’t listed in the legislation — such as the mailers to unregistered but eligible voters that ERIC requires its member states to send.

Bucy proposed changes to the bill that election policy experts say are “guardrails” on systems that could potentially replace the program.

Bucy’s amendment strikes language in the bill that seeks to identify “voters who have been convicted of a felony; and who are not eligible to vote including a felony conviction” and changes it to “voters who are ineligible” under the state Election Code. The amendment also now requires any system the state uses to comply with federal and state laws relating to the protection of personal information.

The changes, which would have to be approved by the Senate before the bill goes to Gov. Greg Abbott’s desk, also say the secretary of state may not contract with a private-sector system unless the contractor requires a background check for its employees. Such a system must also use data from the National Change of Address database to screen for voters who have moved.

“Adding that extra component of verification beyond whatever this mystery vendor might provide is probably a good change,” said Daniel Griffith, senior policy director at Secure Democracy USA, who added that the requirements could help with the state obtaining more accurate information. “But the question is now whether the Senate will accept those amendments.”

Natalia Contreras covers election administration and voting access for Votebeat in partnership with The Texas Tribune. Contact Natalia at ncontreras@votebeat.org.

Texas Republicans approve bill forcing Harris County to eliminate election chief

2023-05-23T22:44:45+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.

The Texas House of Representatives voted Tuesday to force Harris County to eliminate its chief election official and to give state officials more authority over elections there.

On a 81–62 party line vote, House Republicans passed Senate Bill 1750, which will abolish the Harris County elections administrator position — a nonpartisan position appointed by local elected officials — and return all election duties to the county clerk and tax assessor-collector.

Failed amendments by Democrats would have changed the new law’s effective date to December, instead of Sept. 1, to give county officials time to conduct the November county and municipal elections and to transfer the duties. Another failed amendment would have given the authority to transfer election duties to the county commissioners. The bill is now on its way to Republican Gov. Greg Abbott’s desk — and could ultimately face Harris County’s opposition in court.

Harris County Elections Administrator Clifford Tatum said in a statement to Votebeat that when the provision takes effect in September, it’ll be 39 days from the voter registration deadline and 52 days from the first day of early voting for a countywide election that includes the Houston mayoral race.

“We fear this time frame would not be adequate for such a substantial change in administration, and that Harris County voters and election workers may be the ones to pay the price,” Tatum said.

Also approved Monday was a bill that would let the Texas secretary of state intervene in local elections. It would grant the state the authority to investigate election “irregularities” after complaints are filed and the authority to order the removal of a county election administrator or to file a petition to remove a county officer overseeing elections, such as a clerk, if “a recurring pattern of problems” isn’t resolved. The secretary’s current role in elections is only to guide and assist counties, with no oversight powers.

Senate Bill 1933 was originally written to apply to all counties but was amended on the House floor to impact only Harris County, by the House sponsor of the measure, Rep. Tom Oliverson, R-Cypress. The House’s changes to the bill now have to receive approval from the Senate this week.

The set of bills aimed at the state’s most populous county — and third most populous in the nation — were among about a dozen bills authored by Sen. Paul Bettencourt, R-Houston, who has said Harris County election problems in the past year were the “genesis” of the proposals. The Republican-controlled Texas Legislature in recent years has made it a priority to claw back power from cities and counties, often run by Democrats. Lawmakers this year are poised to put new restrictions on all cities that issue local rules that go further than state law, including labor, agriculture, natural resources and finance.

In last November’s general election, Harris County had to extend voting for an hour after various polling places had malfunctioning voting machines, paper ballot shortages and long waiting periods. More than 20 lawsuits from losing Republican candidates have been filed against the county, citing those problems and seeking a redo of the election.

Tatum, the county’s second elections administrator since the position was created in 2020, was hired only two months before November’s election. At the time, Harris County’s election department lacked a tracking system used by large counties to identify issues in real time and for months could not say how many polling locations ran out of paper on Election Day or whether anyone was prevented from voting. A recent investigation by the Houston Chronicle found that out of the more than 782 polling locations, only about 20 ran out of paper.

Tatum said Harris County is unique in “its diverse population, geographical size and number of registered voters and with that comes a unique set of challenges when it comes to running these countywide elections,” Tatum said. “There has never been a flawless countywide election in Harris County, no matter which office or party has conducted the election… The only solution to the issues seen in this County is stability in legislation and in administrative processes and procedures.”

The Texas Election Code allows counties’ commissioners courts, based on their individual needs, to assign election duties to the county clerk and tax assessor-collector — which are elected positions — or to create an elections department and appoint a nonpartisan elections administrator.

Harris was the last large county in Texas to create an elections department and appoint an elections administrator. County leaders appointed an inexperienced elections administrator in 2020 to lead the newly created department in a county with more than 2 million registered voters. Isabel Longoria resigned in July 2022 after the department failed to report unofficial primary election vote totals to the state by the deadline required by law. Tatum, the new elections administrator who has years of experience running elections, inherited Longoria’s department with very little time to fix lingering administrative problems when he was appointed to his role in August.

Harris County leaders say the two bills would set a “dangerous precedent.” That’s why the county is now evaluating whether they can take legal action if the proposals become law.

County Attorney Christian D. Menefee in a statement said state legislators are singling out Harris County “to score cheap political points.”

“I want to be clear: this fight is not over,” Menefee said. “We cannot and will not allow the state to illegally target Harris County.”

Democratic Harris County legislators spoke against the bill on the House floor Tuesday and said the goal of the pieces of legislation was to “punish” the county and take away local control.

Rep. Jarvis Johnson, D-Houston, said the Republican-led state legislature wanted to go into Harris County, a Democratic county, and change it, “for no reason.”

“When y’all see something y’all don’t like, you change it to make sure it fits you,” he said. “All of these Harris County bills are disingenuous and not fair. Don’t come to my community and do something that I didn’t ask you to do. That’s harmful, because when you don’t know the community you can do damage. So it’s very harmful.”

In a statement Monday evening, Harris County Republican Party Chair Cindy Siegel praised the passage of the approval of the bills.

“Ultimately, if the [elections administrator] could pull off an election without major problems, the state legislature wouldn’t have had to step in,” Siegel said. “Unfortunately, as we’ve seen from unprecedented issues, whether that be missing ballots or ballot paper shortages and everything in between, they can’t get it right. Someone eventually has to step in and say, ‘Enough,’ and today, the Texas Legislature did exactly that by passing SB 1750.”

Some election and voting rights advocates say the continuous legislative changes to elections –specifically targeting Harris County– will have negative consequences for voters.

“All of these changes together are forcing Harris County voters to live in a different set of circumstances than the rest of the state. This is creating a disparate scenario for those voters and barriers to well run elections,” said Katya Ehresman, voting rights program director at Common Cause Texas. “There’s a clear partisan element to that with Harris County growing in its Democratic stronghold. But there’s also definitely a disparate racial impact element to these bills continuing to pass as the county is home to the largest population of Black, brown, [Asian American and Pacific Islander] voters in the state.”

Natalia Contreras covers election administration and voting access for Votebeat in partnership with The Texas Tribune. Contact Natalia at ncontreras@votebeat.org.

After a setback, a GOP effort to pull Texas out of a multi-state program to clean voter rolls could move forward

2023-05-17T23:20:47+00:00

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

A Texas House Democrat used procedural tactics this week to delay a vote on legislation pushed by right-wing believers in voter fraud and based on an election conspiracy theory, though the measure could yet move forward.

Senate Bill 1070 was set to allow Texas to withdraw from the Electronic Registration Information Center, also known as ERIC, a multistate coalition used by dozens of states for flagging duplicate voter registrations and cleaning voter rolls.

The ERIC program, considered by election administration experts across the country as the best tool for preventing double-voting across state lines, has been a target of viral conspiracy theories spread since early last year by a fringe conservative publication, the Gateway Pundit. The nonpartisan program compares voter registration rolls from all its member states, along with other data, to flag voters who have died, moved away or registered elsewhere, so that states can remove outdated registrations from their rolls.

Right-wing activists and conservative media falsely say the program is led by left-wing advocates, that its funding comes from Democratic megadonor George Soros, and that it shares voters’ private data with outside groups seeking to give Democrats an advantage, among other allegations. Since last year, eight Republican-run member states — most recently Virginia, on Friday — have announced withdrawals from the program, apparently due to political pressure.

The Texas bill’s surprising setback came after the legislation had been in the works for more than a year and had picked up momentum through both chambers. The bill’s House sponsor, state Rep. Jacey Jetton, a Republican, asked Tuesday to delay a vote on it until after the regular session ends later this month following a point of order – a procedural tactic used to delay or kill legislation– that was raised by state Rep. Mihaela Plesa, D-Dallas.

On Wednesday, after a series of procedural moves, the bill was sent back to the House Elections Committee, which again approved it hours after it was received.

The bill is now headed back to the House chamber to be considered for a vote. The Texas Legislature is scheduled to end May 29.

Neither Jetton nor the bill’s Senate author, Republican state Sen. Bryan Hughes, responded to requests for comment.

In Texas, the movement against ERIC was led by members of the Texas Republican Party in April 2022. Party Vice Chair Dana Myers and Alan Vera, a longtime voter fraud activist and then the Harris County GOP ballot security chair, led the “ERIC task force.” In January, they announced they had drafted a bill and submitted it to Hughes’ staff; he filed Senate Bill 1070 the following month. (Vera died May 4 at the Texas Capitol moments before he was set to testify on election legislation.)

Plesa’s point of order was based on the grounds that the bill analysis, documents filed to explain the purpose and costs associated with legislation, was “materially misleading.”

Plesa told Votebeat she found language in the bill analysis to be vague and “without merit,” singling out a sentence that says “some say the costs associated with ERIC participation have outweighed the benefits.”

“Who is saying this? What costs? This statement is not a reasonable inference based on other verified statements,” Plesa said. “We’re running safe and secure elections in the state of Texas, and it’s very concerning to me that we’re looking at removing our state from this database program and this is coming on the heels of so many other red states leaving this program.”

Plesa said Democrats in the House are prepared to fight attempts to resurrect the ERIC legislation.

“We’ve just got to keep our good eyes on [the bills] and make sure that any reconsideration of this bill is met with objection, and that we’re ready to call more points of order and to get them on record as to what exactly they’re trying to do with removing the state of Texas from ERIC,” she said.

Texas law requires the state to participate in a multistate information-sharing program to clean its voter rolls. The state budgets $1.5 million annually for costs associated with ERIC: about $115,000 for its membership dues and the rest for postage, mailing, and printing costs to send notices to residents whom ERIC identifies as eligible voters who are not yet registered, an effort the program requires of its member states.

In March, after Hughes filed his bill, the Texas secretary of state’s office announced it was taking steps to develop the state’s own program. The state’s former elections director, Keith Ingram, was reassigned to “develop and manage” the new system. Votebeat reported that such an effort could stall or take years to put together. Election and voter registration experts say a viable alternative to ERIC does not exist.

Two weeks ago, Hughes told members of the GOP, including those on the ERIC task force, that the development effort by the secretary of state’s office was “moving pretty fast” and that he was optimistic the legislation would pass.

“But even before that takes effect Sept. 1, even before that, we may already have the new Texas system in place,” he said during a weekly Zoom call.

Alicia Pierce, a spokesperson for the Texas secretary of state, declined to comment on Hughes’ characterization of the timeline. Pierce said Friday that the office was ready to comply if the proposal becomes law.

A recent poll conducted for Secure Democracy, a nonprofit that advocates for election and voting access policy, by Chris Perkins, a Texas-based researcher with the political polling and research company Ragnar, found that Republican voters in Texas support the program.

Researchers surveyed 750 Republican primary voters across the state in April and found that 84% of Texas Republican voters want Texas to remain a member of ERIC to keep voter rolls clean.

Natalia Contreras is a reporter for Votebeat and covers election administration and voting access in partnership with The Texas Tribune. Contact Natalia at ncontreras@votebeat.org.

Harris County’s election problems spark a slew of election bills with momentum in Texas

2023-04-10T10:00:00+00:00

Votebeat is a nonprofit news organization reporting on voting access and election administration across the U.S. A version of this post was originally distributed in Votebeat’s weekly newsletter.

Remember that time, more than a year ago, when Texas lawmakers passed a sweeping voting law that added changes to the process of voting by mail and scrutinized election workers?

That law was mostly driven by baseless claims of widespread voter fraud from the 2020 election. And with its Republican majorities in both chambers, Texas in recent years has moved a lot of bills that make changes to the state’s elections, to be greeted by a Republican governor who’s eager to sign them (unlike in, say, Pennsylvania, Arizona, or North Carolina).

Election fraud conspiracies still abound in the Texas Capitol and in other states. But this year in Texas, the election legislation most likely to get approved largely stems from continued Election Day stumbles in the state’s largest county — Harris County, home to Houston.

State Sen. Paul Bettencourt, a Republican, filed 12 separate election-related bills and “the genesis” of all of them, he said, was Harris County’s mismanagement of recent elections.

“This is about a catastrophic lack of performance in Harris County,” Bettencourt said last week during an hours-long Senate committee hearing to discuss the bills. The House of Representatives’ election committee also held hearings on some of the bills last week. “It’s too big to ignore. The state can’t afford this type of problem in Harris County and neither can the residents.”

During last November’s midterm election, hundreds of voters waited for hours across multiple polling locations due to delayed openings and malfunctioning voting machines. Other polling sites ran out of ballot paper. The county has yet to say whether the problems that day prevented anyone from voting. The county and the election administrator have been sued by the local Republican party and several candidates seeking a new election.

Legislation to give state officials more authority over local elections appears poised to win lawmakers’ support. Among the bills moving forward that would give the state more oversight over how counties conduct their elections:

A bill that would give the secretary of state the authority to intervene and suspend and replace an election administrator.
Another would also allow the office to step in to supervise and assist a county that fails to submit precinct vote totals at least 24 hours after the polls close.
One bill would require local election officials to answer questions related to election irregularities and provide explanations when information is requested by election judges, local and state party chairs, or candidates. If the county fails to provide a “satisfactory” reason, the secretary of state’s office could step in, assess, and if necessary, audit the county.

As Votebeat has reported, bills such as these could have implications for the hiring and retention of election officials and could change the working dynamic between the counties and the secretary of state’s office. Some voting rights advocates say this type of legislation is also concerning because it “infringes on the rights of county governments” who are best positioned to address the needs of their voters.

“Elections policy in Texas is so difficult because trying to build something that’s going to work in Harris County it’s not going to work the same way in some small rural county,” said Daniel Griffith, senior director of policy at Secure Democracy USA. “So anytime we see a one-size-fits-all bill, that raises a certain amount of red flags.”

These are the other election administration and voting bills gaining momentum this session, which we’re watching closely:

A bill that would allow the secretary of state to appoint election marshals to enforce the election code and address violations;
A bill that would raise the penalty of illegal voting to a felony;
A bill that would allow Texas to withdraw from the Electronic Registration Information Center if the state can find a replacement;
And a bill that would penalize district attorneys who refuse to prosecute certain crimes, including election crimes.

All of these bills have already been discussed in Senate committees, with supporters and opponents offering testimony. Some have been voted out of committee and recommended for Senate approval, though they’d still need to get through the state House and be signed by the governor in order to become law. And all of that must happen quickly—- the legislative session will be over by Memorial Day.

Back Then

Last week, the Associated Press reminded us all of a favorite of voting history fiends: The alleged voter fraud that may or may not have allowed former President Lyndon B. Johnson to secure a seat in the U.S. Senate in 1948.

In 1977, Luis Salas, a former South Texas election judge, told an AP reporter that “Johnson did not win that election; It was stolen for him. And I know exactly how it was done.” The story sent shockwaves through the country, though of course nothing could be done.

So, why is this coming up now? The LBJ Library has released the tape of the AP reporter’s interview with Salas.

In Other Voting News

Donald Trump last week became the first former president to face criminal charges after Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg indicted him on 34 counts of fraud in a case related to hush payments paid to a porn star before the 2016 election that, prosecutors said, were intended to influence the election and deceive state tax authorities, the New York Times reported.
Ohio voters will have to present a driver’s license, state identification, or passport when voting under a new law that took effect this month, and can no longer use a utility bill or official mail to verify their identity, WXVU reported.
A federal judge is allowing a case accusing Galveston County officials of violating the Voting Rights Act by drawing skewed political maps that gerrymander along racial lines and dilute the votes of communities of color to move to trial, the Texas Tribune reported.
A clerk for a Michigan township who has been stripped of her authority to administer elections amid an investigation into accusations that she stole election equipment in an attempt to prove fraud will face a recall election next month, Bridge Michigan reported.
A liberal judge’s victory in a Wisconsin Supreme Court race last week will shift the balance of power on the court, and Wisconsin Democrats said their first priority would be to challenge the state’s redistricting maps, The New York Times reported.
The Cook County jail is Chicago’s most active voting precinct since the jail added in-person voting in 2020, the Chicago Tribune reported. The vast majority of inmates have not yet faced trial and are registered voters, though same-day registration is available.

Natalia Contreras is a reporter for Votebeat in partnership with the Texas Tribune. Contact Natalia at ncontreras@votebeat.org.

Watch: A panel on Pennsylvania’s unequal voting rules and how they impact you

2023-03-21T16:36:38+00:00

Pennsylvania voters did not have equal opportunities to cast or correct their ballots during the November 2022 election, according to a Votebeat and Spotlight PA analysis.

As part of a review of all 67 counties’ election policies, the news organizations found that some voters had the opportunity to fix mail ballots with technical errors while others did not. The disparity disenfranchised hundreds of people.

In Pennsylvania, the governor and legislature broadly set election rules, but county officials also make important decisions like whether or not to offer drop boxes. These different decisions result in a patchwork of election policies across the state.

To unpack these disparities, Spotlight PA hosted a panel on Pennsylvania’s unequal election policies and how they impact voters.

Our panelists include:

Kate Huangpu, government reporter, Spotlight PA
Carter Walker, reporter, Votebeat
Lisa Schaefer, executive director, County Commissioners Association of Pennsylvania
Jeff Greenburg, senior advisor on election administration, Committee of Seventy
Susan Gobreski, director of government policy, League of Women Voters of Pennsylvania

Watch a recording of the event below:

Unequal election policies disenfranchised some Pennsylvania voters in 2022. Explore what each county did.

2023-02-21T10:00:00+00:00

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

Pennsylvania voters did not have equal opportunities to cast or correct their ballots during the November 2022 election, the latter producing a disparity that disenfranchised hundreds of voters, a Spotlight PA and Votebeat analysis has found.

As part of a first-of-its-kind review, the news organizations contacted election officials in all 67 counties about policies regarding drop boxes and mail ballots that had disqualifying technical errors. The outlets focused on how counties treat mail ballots, as state law is silent on logistical details that directly impact how Pennsylvanians can vote and whether a person’s vote counts.

Spotlight PA and Votebeat also sought to understand the access voters have to physical polling places and to minutes of meetings held by county election boards that make critical policy decisions such as which ballots get counted and who gets a chance to fix their ballot.

The review found:

At least a dozen counties gave voters the opportunity to fix flawed mail ballots after they were turned in, a process known as ballot curing.
At least nine counties specifically forbade voters from coming into a county election office to fix a disqualifying error on a mail ballot like a missing date or signature on the outer envelope. Nearly 1 million registered voters live in those nine counties, and at least 1,599 mail ballots were rejected there for reasons including a missing date or signature, according to data from the Pennsylvania Department of State.
At least eight counties proactively reached out to voters to tell them about fatal defects with their mail ballots, while six published lists of voters that needed to cure their ballots.
Twenty-seven counties gave voters access to at least one round-the-clock drop box for mail ballots, while 40 — primarily in rural areas — required voters to either mail such a ballot or turn it in during daytime hours to an election office.
Sixty-two counties exceeded a state recommendation on how many voters can be assigned to a precinct. The cap aims to ensure voters do not have prohibitively long wait times to cast a ballot.
Nearly 40 county election offices do not make meeting minutes accessible online. Among those, four make the minutes available upon request or in person at the county election office.

Forty-six counties did not respond to the survey. Spotlight PA and Votebeat turned to publicly available data on the number of drop boxes, voters, and voting precincts in each county to supplement their review.

But information on ballot curing was often unavailable online, meaning the true number of people who weren’t allowed to fix their flawed mail ballots is likely higher than the news organizations could determine.

In Pennsylvania, the governor and legislature broadly set election rules. The last major overhaul of state law came in 2019 when former Democratic Gov. Tom Wolf signed Act 77, which created no-excuse mail voting.

The law, however, does not outline major aspects of mail voting such as drop boxes and ballot curing, a gap that has presented problems for the county officials who create policies and the election workers who must carry them out.

Local election officials have asked the governor and legislature to clarify the law for years. But while Wolf and the formerly GOP-controlled legislature agreed on proposals like allowing pre-canvassing — a policy in which election officials process mail ballots ahead of Election Day — they deadlocked on more contentious issues like expanding voter ID.

Ideally, Pennsylvania counties should make it as easy as possible to vote, said Khalif Ali, executive director of Common Cause Pennsylvania, a group that advocates for expanding public participation in the government and protecting voting rights.

“It’s the beauty and the pain that’s associated with the commonwealth,” Ali said. “We have essentially a number of fiefdoms and each of them has their own budgets, their own way of looking at the law, and applying that law on the ground level.”

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A patchwork of policies

Take Sadsbury Township, Lancaster County, for example. Voters there were not allowed to fix errors on mail ballots such as missing dates, nor could they place those ballots in a drop box.

But their neighbors just over the county line in West Sadsbury Township, Chester County, were allowed to cure their ballots and had access to 13 drop boxes.

The differences in election administration often come down to the makeup of the boards of election. In most cases, those boards are partisan and populated by the county’s elected commissioners. In Lancaster County, the board is majority-Republican and has two members who have consistently questioned the security of drop boxes. Chester County’s board is majority-Democrat.

Overall, 1.7% of mail ballots cast in Lancaster County were rejected because they were mailed without a secrecy envelope, incorrectly dated, or missing a signature or date. In Chester County, that number was 1%.

(Those numbers were provided by the Department of State, whose data may be incomplete.)

Though the legislature acted with wide bipartisan support to allow no-excuse mail voting, some Republican lawmakers have since sought to curtail or eliminate the practice, a push in part due to baseless claims of election fraud spread by former President Donald Trump.

That conflict, as well as gray areas in state law, have resulted in lawsuits over the past two years that target mail voting.

In one, settled just a week before the November 2022 election, the Pennsylvania Supreme Court ordered counties not to count mail ballots with incorrectly dated or undated outer envelopes. Months later, in February, the high court reaffirmed that undated mail ballots should not be counted but left it up to individual counties to determine exactly what an incorrect date is.

The state Supreme Court last year was also asked to wade into the question of whether ballot curing should be allowed. An October decision permitted the practice but did not mandate it.

At least a dozen counties went ahead and allowed voters to cure ballots for reasons including a missing signature or date. Some went even further and tried to make voters aware of issues with their ballots.

Six counties — Allegheny, Chester, Erie, Northampton, Philadelphia, and Potter — published lists that named voters whose ballots had errors. These lists were also passed to third-party organizations, such as good-government groups or local political parties, so they could reach out to those voters independently.

Seven counties, including Chester, personally contacted voters with flawed ballots to direct them to their county election office.

“It is heartbreaking when you are canvassing mail-in votes and you can’t count them when there are so many steps to complete and [the voters] mess up one thing and their vote can’t be counted,” Chester County Solicitor Colleen Frens said.

The counties that did not allow voters to cure ballots provided a range of reasons for doing so, from not having enough staff to handle the extra work to believing the state Election Code does not allow for ballot curing.

The availability of drop boxes also varied widely across the state last fall.

Drop boxes were not available in 40 counties, where over 2.8 million registered voters live. Most of these counties are in rural areas where residents already must drive farther to reach a county election office.

Twenty-seven counties did offer drop boxes, though 15 of them only had only one drop box available. The counties that had multiple drop boxes tended to be in more populated areas, such as Philadelphia and its collar counties.

Lisa Schaefer, executive director of the County Commissioners Association of Pennsylvania, said that while all counties run elections that are consistent with state law, different interpretations of the Election Code and court decisions can lead to a wide array of practices.

“As we’ve seen, everything is kind of subject to interpretation, so the counties are doing their absolute best with what they have, but if we had some help from the state to fix some of these issues that would certainly be helpful,” she said.

In-person access

Access disparities also existed for people who chose to cast their ballot in person last November.

Pennsylvania does not collect data on the amount of time that people have to wait in line to vote. Without that data, voting advocates told Spotlight PA and Votebeat to examine the number of voters assigned to different precincts as a way to gauge possible overcrowding.

Pennsylvania’s Election Code states that each precinct should have between 100 to 1,200 people, though it does not specify how a county should determine the exact number. In practice, election directors told Spotlight PA they have the leeway to make their own choices.

In total, just under a quarter of the 9,155 precincts in Pennsylvania have over 1,200 voters assigned to them and 33.5% have over 2,400, according to a Spotlight PA and Votebeat analysis. Another 57 precincts have over 3,600.

Looking at how many voters are assigned to a precinct isn’t a perfect measure. Some election directors who spoke to Spotlight PA noted that staffing levels vary between precincts to deal with a higher volume of voters.

Pike County, a sprawling northeastern county with relatively few voters, had the highest median of voters per precinct, with over double the recommended number. But Valerie Barbin, a voter and poll watcher for the past two cycles in the county’s most populous precinct, said she hasn’t seen it cause any wait-time issues. That could be because less than 800 of the precinct’s more than 4,700 assigned voters cast a ballot last November.

“What’s also critical to the success of the precinct is that the counties are providing the appropriate resources,” said Jeff Greenburg, senior advisor on election administration to the good-government group Committee of Seventy and a former election director himself.

As part of the review, Spotlight PA and Votebeat also looked at how easy it was to access each county’s board of elections meeting minutes. Those minutes summarize what was discussed by county election officials during public meetings and can include information on contracts with companies to deliver mail ballots, and plans for the number and locations of drop boxes in a county.

Most counties don’t make these minutes easily accessible. Forty do not make them available online, though four of those counties responded in the survey that meeting minutes were available upon request or in person at a county election office.

Changes on the horizon?

Ali of Common Cause said that the different practices across the state favor some voters over others based on where they live. He argued that it violates the spirit of the Pennsylvania Constitution, which states “elections shall be free and equal.”

He emphasized that inconsistencies can discourage voters from participating in the process.

“We need to be able to share information and tell people exactly what’s going on,” Ali said.

Exactly how to change Pennsylvania’s election law to make it fairer has been debated over the past few years.

The Election Law Advisory Board, a group of county commissioners, state lawmakers, and advocates that studies election policies at the behest of the legislature, recently said in a report that “absolute uniformity across all counties would be difficult to achieve and maintain.”

Instead, it recommended that the General Assembly establish minimum requirements for counties that use drop boxes but not mandate their use statewide.

“The goal of this provision is to give counties the flexibility to have drop boxes but at the same time to have them as consistently administered as possible,” the report said.

The report also recommended that the legislature simplify the mail voting process by making secrecy envelopes optional and clarifying that failure to date the ballot should not be the sole reason one is thrown out.

Pennsylvania now has a new governor, Democrat Josh Shapiro, and the legislature is split between Democratic control in the state House and Republican control in the state Senate.

The executive and legislative branches would have to work together to stitch together the patchwork of election policies, but so far they have not committed to any particular actions.

Schaefer said her members are “very eager” for resolution on issues like ballot signatures, drop boxes, and pre-canvassing, and have been since shortly after the 2020 election.

“Unfortunately, I think that the spotlight that is on Pennsylvania because of the narrow distance between our political parties and how close our votes get, that puts a greater scrutiny, I think, on our operation,” she said. “These are things we’d love to be able to address so that every county could feel confident that they are interpreting the law the same way, and that the state would help to provide that clarity to us in the law.”

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

Head start to prepare absentee ballots for counting before election is not the time-saver clerks had hoped for

2022-10-31T14:16:08+00:00

As Michigan clerks prepare to reckon with nearly 1 million absentee ballots they’ve received so far, they say one accommodation meant to give them a head start isn’t the solution it was intended to be, especially for smaller municipalities.

Rather, it’s mostly big cities, including Grand Rapids and Detroit, that will take advantage of a recent legal change allowing clerks to pre-process absentee ballots two days before Election Day.

Pre-processing of the absentee ballots in Michigan involves opening the mail-in envelope and comparing the stub of the envelope with the numbers on the ballot. A secrecy sleeve concealing the ballot stays intact until election workers can scan the ballot through a tabulator on Nov. 8.

Adam Wit, president of the Michigan Association of Municipal Clerks, says many clerks feel “it’s not worth it” to mobilize a staff for a day or two of pre-processing because they won’t have the ability to actually scan the absentee ballots through tabulators, due to how the change was written.

“It doesn’t save them a lot of time,” said Wit. “Everyone wanted the tabulator, and we didn’t get that.”

Ingham County Clerk Barb Byrum says the pre-processing bill approved by the Republican-dominated Michigan Legislature falls short of meeting clerks’ needs.

“All this is is opening an envelope and comparing the number on the stub of the envelope and the number on the ballot,” said Byrum.

Byrum added that without being able to put the ballots through a tabulator, as more than one-third of other states allow, Michigan’s version of pre-processing is not really a time-saver.

“This is settling for crumbs,” Byrum said.

Michigan lawmakers approved a bipartisan measure of election reforms last month, allowing the two days of pre-processing. Previously under the law, clerks couldn’t do anything with the ballots until Election Day. Only clerks in areas with a population of 10,000 or more qualify for the time. The state has more than 1,500 clerks in cities, townships, and villages in its 83 counties.

Byrum said only two of the 21 clerks in her county are choosing to use the pre-processing days. Ingham County has 213,000 registered voters. As of Oct. 25, nearly 60,000 of them had requested absentee ballots, Byrum said.

The only other time clerks have been permitted to pre-process ballots was in 2020 — a temporary concession during a blitz of absentee voting because of COVID-19. Most clerks interviewed by Votebeat Michigan said they liked the option because it eased the pressure on Election Day.

Now, pandemic worries are waning but voters are still opting to cast absentee ballots out of convenience. As of Oct. 25, about a quarter of the state’s 8.1 million active voters had requested absentee ballots, said Michigan Secretary of State spokesman Jake Rollow during a weekly press briefing by the department. Rollow said 771,967 had been returned as of last week, and there’s a good chance half of Michigan voters will have voted absentee by Election Day.

Delta Township Clerk Mary Clark was among the clerks pushing the Legislature for an opportunity to pre-process ballots. As then-president of the state Association of Municipal Clerks, she began lobbying in February for changes to election procedures to enable clerks to run smoother elections. But the bill that passed this fall, after preparations for elections had already begun, gave clerks only a portion of the changes they wanted.

“Clerks are very frustrated,” said Clark, who noted she, too, would not use the new pre-processing time in her Eaton County township, which has 27,590 registered voters.

State Rep. Ann Bollin, a Republican who chairs the state House Elections and Ethics Committee, praised the new legislation. The new law also requires additional security for ballot drop boxes, such as cameras at drop box sites, which have been a focal point for reports of voter intimidation in other parts of the country.

“The agreement we have reached together is a win for election integrity,” Bollin said about the legislation in September. “This process will be transparent and open to poll challengers.”

Bollin did not respond to phone and email requests for comment.

Clerks from Michigan’s biggest cities are more excited about the extra time: The larger the load of absentee ballots, the more helpful those two days are.

Troy City Clerk Aileen Dickson says the pre-processing in any form will help ease the workload for her election workers. Troy has 65,000 registered voters, and Dickson is expecting 20,000 of them to vote absentee.

Dickson said she’ll be able to head off a potential logjam of work on the day of the election. She’s hiring about 70 extra election workers for the pre-processing.

“It’ll help get some of the work out of the way,” said Dickson. “When we took advantage of it in 2020, it worked out well.”

Grand Rapids City Clerk Joel Hondorp also plans to pre-process ballots for one of the two allowed days.

“I’m looking for the fastest way to get ballots to tabulators,” said Hondorp, who notes that it costs the city $5,000 more in labor costs to conduct pre-processing. Grand Rapids, Michigan’s second largest city, has 147,000 registered voters. Hondorp believes 30,000 of them will vote absentee.

In Detroit, city clerk Janice Winfrey is also choosing to pre-process absentee ballots as much as possible. She said it will solve a lot of headaches for her staff on Election Day.

As of Oct. 17, Winfrey’s Detroit Elections Department had received 70,000 absentee ballots. She told reporters at a news conference that she expects to get 100,000 absentee ballots by Election Day.

“We’re definitely going to use pre-processing,” said Winfrey. “It works for us. We can get through election night without wearing out election workers.”

Daniel Baxter, director of elections for the City of Detroit, added that while the election workers cannot use tabulators during the pre-processing of the absentee ballots, using the time is still what’s best for the city.

Baxter admits it’s the “best of both worlds” to be able to put the ballots through for a tabulator but will settle for the benefit of getting some work in before crunch time.

This article is made possible through a partnership with Bridge Michigan, Michigan’s largest nonpartisan, nonprofit news publication.

Oralandar Brand-Williams is a senior reporter for Votebeat in partnership with Bridge Michigan. Contact Oralandar at obrand-williams@votebeat.org.

What has and hasn’t changed about voting in Arizona ahead of the primary

2022-07-07T19:13:02+00:00

Whether voters fill out their ballots at home or head to the polls for the primary election in Arizona this summer, they’ll see some minor changes from 2020, but most new laws you may have heard about won’t affect this primary.

Lawmakers considered more than 100 bills to address perceived election problems based on unsupported allegations emanating from last year’s Senate-led review of Maricopa County’s 2020 election and former President Trump’s stolen-election claims. The most extreme measures did not pass, including attempts to end mail-in voting as Arizonans know it. The vast majority of Arizonans cast their ballots via the state’s long-running vote-by-mail option.

Some changes did get approved by the legislature and signed into law this year and last. The new laws passed this year, though, won’t go into effect until September at the earliest, which means the general election may have some slightly different rules than the primary.

Early voting began this week. If you’re on the early voting list, you can expect to get your ballot in the mail in a few days. Some voters have already gotten their ballots — election officials sent military and overseas voters’ ballots in mid-June.

Here’s a rundown of changes you could see when you cast your ballot for the August primary.

Ballot envelopes a bit different

During the 2021 legislative session, lawmakers approved some small changes to the envelopes you receive from elections offices, including the one that contains your ballot and return envelope and the return envelope itself.

One 2021 law stipulates that early ballot envelopes cannot reveal political party affiliations. Counties use codes instead of identifying parties on the envelopes, which allows workers to make sure the ballot type matches the envelope.

Another 2021 law requires counties to add language to their ballot envelopes allowing someone to check a box indicating it should be returned to the election office if the person it’s addressed to no longer lives at that location.

The county’s new envelope for sending out ballots includes a return-to-sender option to note that the voter no longer lives at that address.

At the polls, another law approved in 2021 calls for voters to be offered a “privacy folder,” essentially a file folder to hide their vote, though they are not required to use it.

Where you will vote may have changed

This year, Maricopa County added many more in-person voting locations using a vote center model, meaning you can vote anywhere instead of in your specific precinct. Vote centers aren’t new for the county this year.

Some longtime polling sites in Maricopa County weren’t used in 2020 because of physical distancing concerns during the worst of the pandemic, said Megan Gilbertson, a spokesperson for the county’s elections department. Those sites will be back in use this year.

Most counties will use some kind of vote centers this election. Pima County, for instance, switched to a vote center model for the first time this year. The county has held mock elections to show voters how new equipment, like ballot-on-demand printers and e-pollbooks, will work.

If you’re an independent, you can make a one-time request to vote in either the Republican or Democratic primary. To do so by mail, you need to request which ballot you want by July 22. (Maricopa voters can do so online here.) If you’re voting in person, you can request a party’s ballot on site at the polls.

Better inks and paper in Maricopa County

To vote your ballot at home, Maricopa County says to use blue or black ink. At the polls, the county will hand out markers with fast-drying ink — but not Sharpies — so that selections don’t smudge, Gilbertson said. While presenting the county’s 2022 election plan, Maricopa County Director of Elections Scott Jarrett told the county’s board of supervisors that Sharpies won’t be used this year, but not because they affected anyone’s votes in 2020. Instead, the county conducted tests on multiple types of marking devices and found a marker that didn’t bleed through ballot paper as much as Sharpies. (Bleed-throughs in 2020 did not affect votes because the ballots are designed with offset columns of the bubbles voters fill in.)

The county is still using Vote Secure paper, a recommended ballot paper to use with its Dominion machines, though the thickness of the paper will be different, Gilbertson said. Last cycle used 80-pound paper; this year it will be 100-pound. The increased paper weight also helps limit bleed-through, Jarrett told the board.

“We are using 100-pound paper for this election because we were able to get it,” Gilbertson said, adding that supply chain issues limited the availability of the heavier paper in 2020.

Counting early ballots sooner

Counties can now begin tabulating early and mail-in ballots sooner, which will help with staffing and seeing results earlier.

A law approved in 2021 allows the tallying of ballots after a successful logic and accuracy test, which every county recently passed, and after the voter’s envelope signature is verified. Previously, counties could start processing ballots as soon as they received them but couldn’t count them until two weeks before Election Day. Results won’t be released until 8 p.m. on Election Day, per Arizona law.

In the 2020 primary, Maricopa County was able to include all early ballots except those received on Election Day into its first drop of results at 8 p.m., Gilbertson said.

The upside of the new law is that “it allows our staff to not work overtime, or as much overtime,” Gilbertson said.

Active Early Voting List in place, but won’t drop you yet

One of the most significant shifts to election law in 2021 changed the state’s Permanent Early Voting List — the feature of Arizona elections that allows voters to receive a ballot in the mail for every election without re-applying for one — into the Active Early Voting List. The shift is more than semantic.

If you were on the Permanent Early Voting List and still an eligible voter, you were transferred to the Active Early Voting List automatically.

In order to stay active, you need to participate by mail ballot in at least one election every four years, including primary and general elections and municipal elections. Voters will receive a notice from their recorder by mail if they don’t vote at least once in that period, asking them if they want to remain on the Active Early Voting List. If they don’t respond saying yes, they’ll be removed from the list. Voters may also request an early, mail-in ballot as a one-time request instead of joining the AEVL.

It’s not yet clear how many voters will be removed from the active list and no one will receive notice of removal until after the 2024 election cycle. Voters would remain registered if they’re removed from the list, they just won’t automatically receive a ballot via mail anymore. The law is the subject of a lawsuit by groups that claim it violates the federal Voting Rights Act and is racially discriminatory.

Most new laws you’ve heard about are not in place yet

Gov. Doug Ducey signed several new voting-related laws in the 2022 legislative session, though they won’t be in effect until the general effective date for new legislation, which is Sept. 24 this year.

Among those newly signed bills was House Bill 2492, which requires federal-only voters to provide proof of citizenship before casting a ballot. Currently, voters who don’t provide proof of citizenship can’t vote in state elections, but they can vote in federal ones, like congressional and presidential contests. A similar Arizona law went all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court, which ruled in 2013 the state’s requirement was unconstitutional. This law is not in effect yet, though two groups immediately sued after Ducey signed it. The U.S. Department of Justice also sued Arizona over the law this week, saying the measure violates the National Voter Registration Act.

Other new bills include one that allows people to have their early ballot tabulated on-site at a polling place on Election Day if they show ID. Currently, voters can either drop off early ballots at a polling place or dropbox on Election Day, but can’t put their ballots directly into a tabulator if they want to see the final step of the vote-counting process for themselves. Another signed bill calls on the Arizona Game and Fish Department to provide voter registration forms or links to online voter registration to people who get hunting and fishing licenses. (A similar provision was in the state budget last year, but was struck down in an Arizona Supreme Court ruling over unconstitutional budgeting.)

Senate Bill 1008 increased the margins for automatic election recounts, which will likely result in far more recounted races, though that won’t be in effect until the general election.

One bill Ducey signed this week would require voter rolls to be compared to other databases and records, like voter registrations and driver’s licenses in other states, jury forms, and death records. Ducey vetoed a bill with some of these provisions earlier this year.

Rachel Leingang is a freelancer for Votebeat and co-founder of the Arizona Agenda. Contact Rachel at rleingang@votebeat.org.

Arizona would likely see recounts after every election under new law

2022-05-23T18:10:26+00:00

Update May 23, 11 a.m. MST: Gov. Doug Ducey signed the bill into law Friday after the Arizona House voted 50-1-9 on May 17 to pass it.

Arizona’s largest county, Maricopa, would likely be required to recount all ballots cast in every election moving forward if a proposed change to state law passes.

The bill, awaiting a final vote as early as today in the Arizona Legislature after garnering bipartisan support, would vastly widen the margin of votes between candidates that triggers an automatic recount in primary and general elections, for almost every type of race. The change would prompt more frequent recounts in large and small counties alike. In the 2020 general election, it would have triggered two statewide recounts and two countywide recounts in Maricopa County, including the presidential race which Joe Biden won narrowly in the state.

The stated goal is to build voter confidence in election outcomes in a battleground state where margins are often tight and recounts are currently rarely allowed. State Sen. Michelle Ugenti-Rita, R-Scottsdale, who introduced Senate Bill 1008, says it would still only require recounts on races that are very close.

“Here is an opportunity to help reinforce the process,” Ugenti-Rita said. “To give the voters confidence that, when races are razor tight, we make sure they were counted accurately.”

But national election consultants with expertise in recounts, along with associations representing officials in Arizona counties, warn the proposal may lead to a burdensome number of recounts, add to election costs, delay election results, and make it difficult to meet deadlines between the primary and general elections. They argue that those are heavy tradeoffs considering that recounts almost never change the outcome of elections.

“The bill will increase costs to run elections because counties will be required to hire additional employees, it will create additional wear and tear on machines, and increased potential for delays in canvassing results,” Robin Hillyard of the County Supervisors Association of Arizona wrote to House Minority Leader Rep. Reginald Bolding in March, urging him to vote no on the bill in committee. Both that association and the Arizona Association of Counties oppose the bill. Bolding voted yes.

The last statewide recount, for a proposition in 2010, examined about 1.8 million ballots. It took between one and two weeks, and was “like having a second election,” according to former Secretary of State Ken Bennett. It cost counties a total of $66,237, according to the secretary of state’s office, which estimates that recounts today would cost much more, considering 3.4 million Arizonans cast ballots in 2020.

Ugenti-Rita said the counties’ opposition shows how unwilling they are to make any changes to elections, even those that have bipartisan support and “make the current law better.”

“This is an important bill, and a reasonable bill, and yet they are picking it apart,” she said. “This is exactly why people don’t give a crap about what counties say anymore because they aren’t willing to make adjustments.”

Historically, across the country, statewide recounts have rarely led to a reversal of results.

In 31 statewide recounts from 2000 to 2019 in the United States, races were reversed three times, according to research from national nonprofit FairVote. Those races all had tiny margins – and all would have already qualified for recounts in Arizona under the current law.

For this reason, the nonprofit recommends Arizona’s existing 0.1 percent margin as a best practice for states, said Deb Otis, senior research analyst.

“It’s already capturing all of the races in which a recount could be consequential,” she said, adding that states with a 0.5 percent trigger can lead to “paying for unnecessary recounts.”

Some national consultants said that while the increased number of recounts may be burdensome for counties, it may also be the right thing to do to improve voter confidence.

“For Arizona it is a matter of balancing the impact as far as the workload for election officials by increasing the election trigger, balance that with increasing public confidence and transparency and the examination of more ballots,” said Mark Halvorson of Citizens for Election Integrity Minnesota.

The bill is one of more than 100 election-related proposals in the statehouse this year, and represents a broader attempt nationally by Republicans to change election laws following the challenges to the 2020 election.

Some Democratic lawmakers oppose the proposal, saying they see it as another misdirected attempt at changing election law to appease the Stop the Steal crowd when current law is working fine.

Democratic state Sen. Martín Quezada said in a hearing in February that the bill was furthering the narrative that voters can’t have confidence in the election results, and “that’s irresponsible of us as policy makers to continue to further that narrative.”

But unlike most other proposals in the state, this bill has momentum. It was one of less than a dozen election bills to make it through the Senate, passing with all Republicans and one Democrat —Sen. Sean Bowie — voting for it. Then, it flew through the House Government and Elections Committee with a unanimous bipartisan yes vote, including from Bolding.

The bill is scheduled to be heard before the House on Tuesday. Lawmakers could decide to vote on the bill shortly after. If it passes without any changes, it would head to the governor’s desk.

This is Ugenti-Rita’s second time proposing the bill. Last year, the bill saw broad support but never made it to a final vote.

Gov. Doug Ducey, who would need to sign the bill for it to become law, indicated his support in a tweet last year, stating that it was one of the election-related reforms he wanted to make this year.

How automatic recounts would be triggered under new law

Under the proposal, automatic recounts would be triggered if the difference in votes between the winner of the election and the runner-up was less than 0.5 percent of the total votes cast for the two candidates.

Currently, automatic recounts are triggered when the margin between the candidates is the lesser of the following: Either 0.1 percent of the total votes cast for the two candidates, or a set number of votes somewhere between 10 and 200, depending on the race.

For statewide races of more than 25,000 votes or statewide ballot measures, the margin threshold is 200; for statewide races of 25,000 votes or less, the number is 50; for state legislative seats, the number is 50; for county, city, or town positions, the number is 10. These set numbers are often the lesser number, and therefore the determinant in whether the recount happens. They would be eliminated under the proposal.

The law would require the same type of recounts as the current law does: A full machine recount of the race along with, in some state and federal races, a 5 percent hand count of randomly selected ballots.

As an example, under the proposal, if the top two candidates in a state senate race together got 100,000 votes and the winner won by 500 votes or less, the race would be automatically recounted, when the law now says that margin would need to be 50 votes or less.

The proposed margin is still “very, very close,” Ugenti-Rita said.

In the 2020 general election, the presidential race – which Biden won by 10,457 out of about 3.3 million votes cast for him or Trump – had about a 0.3 percent margin and would have been recounted statewide automatically under the proposal.

But so would have the state senate race won by Democrat Sen. Christine Marsh (with a 497-vote margin), and many local races. In Maricopa County, that includes the race won by Republican Recorder Stephen Richer (4,599 vote margin) and Republican Supervisor Jack Sellers (403 vote margin).

Ugenti-Rita said the bill is not aimed at reversing election results. But she did say that Biden’s close margin in Arizona, the closest for the presidential race in the country, “highlighted that there is a lot on the line and when these races are close, it’s a good idea to make sure they are counted accurately.”

Questions about Biden’s win led the Republican leaders of the Senate to order the partisan audit of Maricopa County’s election in which the nearly 2.1 million ballots cast were recounted by hand.

That recount, while criticized for being poorly executed and hyper-partisan, again found that Biden won, and did not change the minds of many voters who still believe the election was stolen from Trump.

Margin would “very likely” trigger recounts every election

There have been five Arizona recounts on state races since 2000, including the one statewide recount of Proposition 112 in 2010, according to the secretary of state’s office.

If the bill passes, a preliminary review by Maricopa County found it “is very likely that multiple local and statewide contests would trigger a recount after every primary and general election,” said Megan Gilbertson, Elections Department spokesperson.

The law applies to all races but those for “precinct committeemen, school district governing boards, community college district governing boards, fire district boards or fire district chiefs or secretary-treasurers or boards of other special districts.”

Even if a recount was triggered only for a small city election — say, El Mirage’s ballot question that saw 17,136 ballots cast in 2020 — the county would need to recount all 2 million or so ballots cast, because ballots are not cast or sorted by precinct or city, and so election workers would have to look at all ballots to find those with the municipal question on them. Most ballots are cast in the mail or at vote centers, which allow voters to vote anywhere in the county.

Maricopa County is still working on cost estimates for the potentially increased number of recounts. The county supervisors association also does not have cost estimates from counties, but Hillyard said “it is expected the bill will increase costs to run elections and additional resources to help cover those costs would be helpful.”

Bolding, the Democratic leader supporting the bill, said he plans to introduce an amendment that would require the state to pay counties for the cost of conducting the recounts. Ugenti-Rita said Monday she had not seen the language, so she could not say whether she would support it.

But she did say she believes it’s unnecessary for the state to appropriate funding for the measure, saying the counties “have plenty of money.”

Arizona would be the new Florida for recounts

Ugenti-Rita pointed out that her proposed trigger for an automatic recount is the same as other states.

Alabama, Colorado, Connecticut, Delaware, Florida, New York, and Pennsylvania all have similar triggers, although some vary based on race or have other qualifiers, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures.

In Florida, local recounts have been common since the trigger was put in place in 2001, but statewide recounts have been rare, with just three.

Leon County, Florida, which includes Tallahassee, has done between a half dozen to 10 in that timeframe, said Mark Earley, the county’s supervisor of elections.

In November 2018, it took Leon County four days to conduct a machine recount of the 141,111 ballots cast in three races and two days to conduct a hand recount for two races. The overtime pay cost $13,491 for the machine recount and $15,840 for the hand recount.

The hand count takes time, is stressful, opens the ballots to being mishandled or damaged, opens the process to politics, and always has the potential for fraud, Earley said.

“Everyone has their hand in the cookie jar when elections are most fragile,” he said. “That is not the way to do it.”

But also, he said, he doesn’t see a reason to re-run all ballots through the same machines used the first time.

Florida’s law requires a full machine recount of ballots. It only sometimes requires a hand count to go along with that, if the margin was less than 0.25 percent and if there were enough undervotes or overvotes in the race to change the outcome of the election.

The hand count then only looks at the undervotes and overvotes in the race to determine voter intent. Earley said it makes sense to focus in this way, since you want to catch the ballots that the machines may not have read properly.

He helped the state find what he considers a better way to do audits and recounts, which he said makes sense elsewhere, too. Instead of re-running the ballots through the same machines, Leon County uses Clear Ballot machines, which produce electronic copies of the ballots for later analysis, to scan and read ballots immediately after the election.

Those results can then be compared with the original results under the required audit the county must do, and the images are already available for the recount and to quickly find overvotes and undervotes that need to be evaluated for the hand count.

Bennett, the former secretary of state who was also the liaison to last year’s Senate review of Maricopa County’s election, said he thinks using Clear Ballot, or some other electronic ballot review system, would be smart in Arizona if recounts are going to become more common.

Bennett said that he sees the need to create a standard percentage threshold that determines the trigger, rather than have a number such as 10 to 200. But he would be wary of a law that would require frequent recounts.

In 2010, the recounted ballot measure had passed by 126 votes, Bennett recalled, and after recounting all the ballots by machine, the results changed by only 12 votes.

Other ways to strengthen audits and recounts to improve voter trust

Election consultants say that there are other ways of increasing voter confidence that aren’t as burdensome or costly for local election officials, such as strengthening post-election audits or focusing recounts on looking more closely at voter intent.

Halvorson in Minnesota and others recommend hand counts for recounts instead of simply running the ballots through the same machines again.

Jennifer Morrell of The Elections Group, a national elections consulting firm, said Arizona’s recount bill should be considered hand-in-hand with its existing audit law.

Arizona’s audit law is strong in that it requires a hand count of a certain number of ballots, Morrell said, and then if mistakes are found, more ballots are examined, which could eventually lead to a full hand recount.

Morrell said she understands the concerns counties have about doing recounts more frequently, especially the hand-count part. In Colorado, she said, a hand recount of 500 ballots took three days.

“The only way to get it right is to be slow and methodical,” she said.

But, she said, she also understands the desire to increase the threshold for recounts in Arizona, since it may help assure candidates with tight margins that there were no irregularities in counting votes.

“With the growing chorus of candidates not wanting to concede their loss, this has the potential to help with that.”

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

A bipartisan start to Electoral Count Act reform

2022-02-07T17:11:45+00:00

A version of this post was originally distributed in Votebeat’s weekly newsletter. Sign up here.

Electoral Count Act reform is the new hot topic on the Hill. There’s a real chance for bipartisan progress here, with key moderate Republicans and Democratic leadership both expressing interest in moving forward. And sure, that’s not a material step, but in this deeply divided political environment? It’s the best start we can expect.

Former President Donald Trump is already kicking up a fit. He used the law’s ambiguities to justify his claim in 2021 that the vice president could reject the electoral votes of certain states, and sees the push to rewrite the law as proof that the vice president had such power. “If the Vice President (Mike Pence) had ‘absolutely no right’ to change the Presidential Election results in the Senate, despite fraud and many other irregularities, how come the Democrats and RINO Republicans, like Wacky Susan Collins, are desperately trying to pass legislation that will not allow the Vice President to change the results of the election?” Trump asked.

That’s some simplistic logic, and it ignores the other obvious motivations to reform the text of a 134-year-old law. First among them: Preventing another Jan. 6. I wrote about this a few weeks ago. The rioters and insurrectionists who invaded the seat of American political power last year did so partly because of their misunderstanding of this very law. Many falsely assumed — based on what they were told about the law’s extremely vague and loophole-ridden language — that the vice president could toss out perfectly legitimate votes. They stormed the Capitol, chanting “Hang Mike Pence” for that reason.

The funny thing about Trump’s temper tantrum is that it presents clear motivation for reforming the law. In raging against it, he is proof that the appetite exists to exploit the squishy parameters of the ECA again.

That is not a Democratic-Party-Only concern. The ECA’s broad language about counting Electoral College votes and about who has the power to reject them and for what reasons is a problem for both parties. In theory, either party could make use of the vague standards to reject legitimate votes and swing presidential elections in its favor. As Ed Kilgore of New York Magazine wrote this week, “There’s no particular reason to think it would happen, but the atmosphere of lawlessness surrounding Trump’s attempted election coup might convince Democrats the system is broken so completely that it’s just a matter of which party has the superior strength of will to seize power.”

A bipartisan group of Senators is working on one proposal to reform the act, and Sens. Angus King (I-Maine), Amy Klobuchar (D-Minn.), and Dick Durbin (D-Ill.) have introduced another option. The latter would, among other things, make explicit that the vice president does not have the power to overturn the Electoral College, offer a longer window for the “safe harbor” date allowing states to complete recounts or necessary investigations before certifying their results, specify grounds for members of Congress to object to the votes, and increase the number of backers needed to sustain an objection to electors’ vote. “Taken together, the proposed legislation would confront electoral subversion at both the state and federal levels by helping ensure that partisan politicians cannot substitute their own preferences for the judgment of the American people in presidential elections,” the senators write. It is likely that the bipartisan group of senators will come up with much the same list of priorities.

Back Then

The term “Electoral College” does not appear in the text of the Constitution itself, though the collection of electors that the Constitution dictates have always been collectively referred to in this way. (Merriam-Webster has a fascinating article on why this term is used.) If you took U.S. history in high school, you probably know that the Founders settled on the Electoral College as a result of a compromise between those who wanted a strict popular vote and those who didn’t want the American people to have any say at all in electing the president. Among the most compelling reasons for the compromise? The existence of slavery. James Madison preferred a popular vote but acknowledged it would be difficult to get Southern states on board given the presence of so many slaves. He wrote, “There was one difficulty, however of a serious nature attending an immediate choice by the people. The right of suffrage was much more diffusive in the Northern than the Southern States; and the latter could have no influence in the election on the score of Negroes. The substitution of electors obviated this difficulty and seemed on the whole to be liable to the fewest objections.”

In Other Voting News

The Associated Press has a useful roundup of the bills in statehouses across the country that would expand criminal penalties for threatening election workers. “Nationally, we are seeing longtime experienced election leaders and their staffs leaving their positions for other work because they’ve had it — this is it, this has crossed the line,” Vermont Secretary of State Jim Condos told the AP.
A Dec. 18, 2020, memo obtained by the Washington Post, advocated that Trump analyze National Security Administration data to prove foreign intervention in the 2020 election. The memo’s origins remain unknown, but was circulated among Trump allies.
A third Republican county clerk in Colorado is under investigation for allegedly copying sensitive election data without authorization. Douglas County Clerk Merlin Klotz allegedly posted video surveillance of the county’s voting machines along with answers to a variety of questions on the social media site Telegram — an app popular with the far right. In the post, he appears to suggest he “took a full image backup of our server.” He has until Feb. 10 to respond to questions from the secretary of state.
In a rare display of bipartisan support for an elections bill, a proposal to update New Mexico’s laws on poll challengers and expand voting options won unanimous approval in the state Senate this week. The bill requires counties to use vote centers that allow voters to cast ballots anywhere in the county, imposes limits on poll watchers, and updates cleaning requirements for the voter roll.
After a Pennsylvania court struck down the state’s vote-by-mail law — which allows mail-in voting by any registered voter — the state’s Supreme Court has decided to hear the case. Arguments are scheduled for March 8 in Harrisburg. The law remains in force until the court issues its ruling.
Officials in Pennsylvania are continuing to raise concern over the impact of the state’s delayed redistricting maps on their ability to prepare for the May 17 primary election. Mail-ballot applications are going out this week, but local election administrators still don’t know whom they ultimately will put on the ballots or what voters get which ballot.
The numbers are out: The failed recall election of California’s governor cost taxpayers a cool $200 million. $174 million of that was carried by the counties, and the rest by the secretary of state’s office. Shockingly, that number is less than the originally estimated $278 million.
A Republican candidate for Michigan’s state Senate advised his followers to “show up armed” at polling places if they serve as election observers. The candidate, Mike Detmer, has been endorsed by former President Trump. County officials advise voters not to do this, obviously.
Minnesota Secretary of State Steve Simon has rejected a request by the Crow Wing County Board to audit the 2020 election. The county made the request after being lobbied for months by a group of citizens who had a “vibe” that the 2020 election had been stolen.
A bill in West Virginia would make it a felony to knowingly vote twice in an election, a crime that is currently a misdemeanor. It appears to be sailing right through the Legislature.

Infographic of the Week

By Brianna Fisher, Votebeat fellow

This week’s infographic looks at the volume of Democratic-sponsored voting reform bills introduced in Congress, starting in 2016. As you can see: The vast majority of these bills were introduced, and then very few progressed toward becoming law after that.

Even as Democrats increased their power in chambers of Congress and won the presidency, Democrats have made little progress in the space. In both the 2015-16 and 2017-18 sessions, no voting reform bills passed either the House or Senate. The 2019-20 session had the most success with two bills passing the House and one becoming law (S. 1321 Defending the Integrity of Voting Systems Act). In the 2021–22 session so far, three bills have passed the House only. Political observers’ theories on this track record range from GOP obstructionism to lack of Democratic unity to ineffective White House leadership to unwillingness of lawmakers to limit the scope of their bills.

What is the plan to advance voting rights legislation?

2022-01-18T06:08:45+00:00

A version of this post was originally distributed in Votebeat’s weekly newsletter. Sign up here.

This week, President Joe Biden gave a speech on voting rights from the Atlanta University Center Consortium, on the grounds of Clark Atlanta University and Morehouse College. Like many people, I have spent much of the week reading and listening to analysis of the speech and Democrats’ plan to advance voting rights. It seems that I’m not alone in wondering just what that plan is.

Biden’s speech was filled with passionate rhetoric, which left some in his own party thinking he may have gone too far while many others thinking he didn’t go nearly far enough. During the speech he made clear his support for filibuster reform, something that will surely be needed if any voting rights legislation is going to pass the Senate, but he failed to make clear which specific reforms he supported.

“The question we keep asking ourselves from a political perspective is why? What are they doing?” asked Jake Sherman, founder of Punchbowl News.

Professor Rick Hasen called Biden’s speech “too little too late” on Slate’s What’s Next. “Over the summer Biden could have been pushing voting rights,” he said. “He could have been giving a speech a week.”

“The numbers are the numbers,” said NPR White House Correspondent Ayesha Roscoe on NPR’s Politics Podcast. “It seems like it’s going to take some real legislative maneuvering if Biden is going to be able to get something done on voting rights.”

A few weeks ago, I wrote about how Biden could better use his bully pulpit to fight for voting rights. I contrasted his relative silence to President Lyndon Baines Johnson (D) , who was a master of using his presidential power to force change for civil rights. “What do you want left after you, when you die?” he famously asked George Wallace. “Do you want a great big marble announcement that reads, ‘George Wallace — he built.’ Or, do you want a little piece of scrawny pine board lying across that harsh caliche soil that reads, ‘George Wallace — He hated.”

Biden clearly tried to take a page from that book in his speech. “So, I ask every elected official in America: How do you want to be remembered?” he said. “Do you want to be on the side of Dr. King or George Wallace? Do you want to be on the side of John Lewis or Bull Connor? Do you want to be on the side of Abraham Lincoln or Jefferson Davis?”

Not as vivid, certainly, but it gets the same point across. Biden’s speech was well-written and conveyed a clear intent to reform voting even if it lacked in specifics. But — as LBJ repeatedly demonstrated — intermittent speeches are not enough. Speeches must be backed by powerful leadership, clear direction, and a brazen willingness to place civil rights at the forefront of the country’s priorities.

Late in the week, Democrats pulled some creative maneuvering: They subbed out most of the space-related language from a NASA bill, replaced it with the language from both the Freedom to Vote Act and the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act. While the move prevents it from being blocked by an initial filibuster and will force senators to record their votes on filibuster reform on the record, Republicans can still block this bill from final consideration and likely will.

There is no more of a plan for filibuster reform now than there was before Biden’s speech. And, with few exceptions, Biden could have given the exact same speech nearly a year ago with few necessary changes. The same is certainly true for the speech Vice President Kamala Harris gave before Biden took the stage. She called for the Senate to act on this moment so that we can tell future generations “we acted with the urgency that this moment demands.” A valid sentiment, save that we’ve been living in this moment for more than a year.

The only reasonable path forward — based on, you know, math — is for Democrats to choose to limit their bills, and attempt to achieve bipartisan support (or even full party support) for smaller steps forward. The question is no longer “Which voting measure should we pass?” it is “Can we pass any voting measures at all?”

In Other Voting News

This is still weird to type, but cash is truly flowing into secretaries of state races — at least for Republicans. The Republican State Leadership Committee, which manages these races, raised a whopping $14.3 million in the fourth quarter of 2021 — making an annual total of $33.3 in an off election year. Democrats, meanwhile, raised just $1 million during the first six months of 2021.
One month ahead of what is expected to be a low-turnout primary in Wisconsin, Waukesha County Circuit Court Judge Michael Bohren has banned the state’s use of drop boxes for casting ballots. The plaintiffs, represented by attorneys from the conservative Wisconsin Institute for Law & Liberty, argue that state law does not specifically permit ballots to be returned in drop boxes, and Bohren agreed. Drop boxes have long been used in Wisconsin but their use increased dramatically in 2020. The ruling will almost certainly be appealed.
We tried to warn them about this, but here we go: The clerk in Travis County, Texas, home of Austin, says that half of absentee ballot applications have so far been rejected as a result of the state’s new law. As we wrote way back in July (JULY), the law required voters to submit either part of their Social Security number or their driver’s license number to prove their identity when submitting an absentee ballot application. The problem? Nearly 2 million Texans don’t have both on file, meaning they have to guess between the two. Mismatches are rejected.
A grand jury in Mesa County, Colorado, will consider allegations of official misconduct and tampering with county election equipment levied against Tina Peters, the county clerk who leaked secure voting data to Mike Lindell. The grand jury decision came the same day that Peters filed for re-election.
Indiana has become the latest state to require paper ballot backups. A new law requires 10 percent of all paperless voting systems to be replaced or reconfigured to include paper by the summer of 2024. The state was one of eight that used at least some machines with paperless voting machines in 2020.
Native American leaders expressed their concerns over voting laws in Arizona this week, especially over Senate Bill 1133, which would bar all-mail elections. “Many of our elders and those living in remote communities (would) have to drive hundreds of miles and several hours to cast their ballots,” said Navajo Nation President Jonathan Nez.

Good News of the Week

The safety of election workers took center stage this week in several states. In Washington, the Senate passed legislation that would protect election workers. The Senate unanimously approved a bill that would make it a Class C Felony to threaten an election worker, with violations potentially resulting in a five-year prison sentence and a $10,000 fine. The measure now moves to the House.

A bill in Maine aimed at protecting election workers appears to be garnering wide support in the state. LD1821, sponsored by Rep. Bill White (D-Waterville), would make threats against elections officials a criminal offense. “Those who toil to make our elections in Maine safe and secure should be safe and secure themselves, we owe them nothing less,” said bill co-sponsor Rep. Lois Reckitt (D-South Portland).

And finally, in Michigan, in one of the first known successful prosecutions of someone threatening an election official, Mathew Smith, 24, was sentenced to 12 months’ probation, was ordered to perform 240 hours of community service, was fined $650, and was required to write an essay on the effects of bullying others. Smith, chairman of the Genesee County Republican Party and a member of the Davison Community Schools Board of Education was sentenced after pleading guilty to malicious use of a telephone for making a harassing phone call to Houghton County Clerk Jennifer Kelly.

Nothing has changed to prevent another Jan. 6

2022-01-11T04:14:57+00:00

A version of this post was originally distributed in Votebeat’s weekly newsletter. Sign up here.

I wish I could tell you I was feeling optimistic. I wish that – a year and two days after the January 6th insurrection — some element of a solution to our current crisis has presented itself. It hasn’t. As Democrats and Republicans in Congress move farther and farther apart — and factions within each party move farther from each other — no large-scale policy has come to fruition that would strengthen elections across America, restore trust to the electoral system, or prevent another insurrection.

One of the obstacles to progress was made clear this week during a debate about the Democrats’ efforts to reform voting. I was on NPR’s 1A, where I said Democrats were making perfection the enemy of good with their singular focus on a pair of voting rights bills. The next day, Sen. Amy Klobuchar (D-Minnesota) — one of the leading proponents of voting reform legislation — was asked to respond to my observation. She didn’t have a direct answer. She said, for example, that the Freedom to Vote Act — which comes in at a whopping 600 pages — was a “very focused approach” to our current predicament. She also acknowledged that not a single Republican would support the measure, and that Democratic Sens. Joe Manchin (West Virginia) and Kyrsten Sinema (Arizona) have signaled no willingness to support filibuster reform. Still, she said she was confident it would pass.

That confidence doesn’t square with the political reality that she knows to be true. And a change in that reality is unlikely in the future because of the approaching midterms, when Democrats will almost certainly lose seats, making reform even less of a possibility.

Democrats’ calculus got even more complex this week, when party leaders refused to even consider the Republicans’ offer to work on reforms to the Electoral Count Act. “The Electoral Count Act [reform] says you can rig the elections any way you want and then we’ll count it accurately,” Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-New York) said in an interview with Politico. That characterization leaves out a lot of important context and minimizes a widely recognized need across the political spectrum for the reforms.

The Electoral Count Act — which dictates how electoral college votes are cast and objected to — was written in 1875. It is alarmingly broad, and provides almost no specific details for why an objection might be offered. It is this lack of specificity that allowed Republican senators like Josh Hawley (Missouri) and Ted Cruz (Texas) to flout American norms and demean our democratic process. Fixing this could be priority number one for Democrats, and it is still unclear why they are not embracing the offer by Republican leadership to tackle this issue.

The Democratic bills on voting are not — simply are not — moving forward. Yet the Democrats are not pursuing any alternatives, even as other options to strengthen elections exist.

“Democrats have not prioritized dealing with election subversion,” University of California at Irvine law professor Rick Hasen told me. “They wasted many months pushing H.R. 1 when there was a moment for at least some Republican support for anti-subversion legislation. Of course, Republicans have been far worse, either parroting Trump’s Big Lie or afraid to stand up to him (with a few notable exceptions).”

Derek Muller, a professor at the University of Iowa’s law school, agreed. “The voting bills in Congress don’t prevent riots at the Capitol, and they aren’t targeted at improving Capitol security,” he said.

He points out that there are elements of the bills, “such as requiring paper ballots, encouraging risk-limiting audits, increasing funding to states to modernize election equipment, and increasing online access to voting materials—that could dramatically improve security and confidence in elections with bipartisan support.” But, there seems to be no appetite among Democratic leaders to offer a narrower bill or bipartisan measures, even as they’ve repeatedly failed to convince every member of their own party of the inherent usefulness of the broader legislation.

It has been a year since hundreds of violent radicals stormed the seat of American democracy. Since then, elections have been left vulnerable by the very people who have the power to protect them; former President Trump has continued his campaign of misinformation; and Congress has enacted no new policy to help prevent a repeat insurrection.

With such high stakes facing the country, small achievable measures might be more effective at preserving democracy than hopeless ambitions.

Back Then

We aren’t going to turn the clock back very far today – just about a year and what a difference a year can make. In the immediate wake of the attack on the Capitol, numerous high-profile Republicans spoke out against the violence. Vice President Mike Pence said: “To those who wreaked havoc in our Capitol today, you did not win. Violence never wins. Freedom wins. And this is still the people’s house.” A year later, in comments on Fox News, he downplayed the attack on democracy and said he was focused on looking forward. Rep. Kevin McCarthy (R-California), the House minority leader, said on Jan. 6, 2021 that “the president bears responsibility” for the “attack on Congress by mob rioters.” This week, he and others laid the responsibility for the overtake of the Capitol on House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s (D-California) feet. Last year, Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-South Carolina) appeared to cut ties with the president on the floor of the Senate. “Oh my God, I hate it. From my point of view, he’s been a consequential President, but today, first thing you’ll see. All I can say is count me out. Enough is enough,” he said. But this week? He called President Joe Biden’s speech a “brazen politicization of January 6.” And perplexingly added, “I wonder if the Taliban who now rule Afghanistan with al-Qaeda elements present, contrary to President Biden’s beliefs, are allowing this speech to be carried?”

In Other Voting News

President Joe Biden’s speech delivered at the Capitol Rotunda on the one-year anniversary of the attack on the Capitol is worth reading. “We saw it with our own eyes. Rioters menaced these halls, threatening the life of the Speaker of the House, literally erecting gallows to hang the Vice President of the United States of America,” he said. A good reminder for everyone of how close the country came to even more tragedy.
In a statement signed by members of Black Voters Matter Fund, the Asian American Advocacy Fund, the New Georgia Project Action Fund and the GALEO Impact Action Fund, activists have asked the Administration that Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris not visit Georgia next week unless they have a firm plan to pass voting legislation. “Georgia voters made history and made their voices heard, overcoming obstacles, threats, and suppressive laws to deliver the White House and the U.S. Senate,” the statement said. “In return, a visit has been forced on them, requiring them to accept political platitudes and repetitious, bland promises. Such an empty gesture, without concrete action, without signs of real, tangible work, is unacceptable.”
Voting rights legislation may be indefinitely stalled in Congress, but New Mexico isn’t waiting. Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham (D) and Secretary of State Maggie Toulouse Oliver (D) have introduced a proposal to, among other things, allow 16-year-olds to vote in local elections and restore voting rights to those convicted of a felony. Lujan Grisham said in a statement, “it is more important than ever to safeguard access to the ballot box. While voting rights are under attack across the country, New Mexico is taking every action to protect and expand them.”
In Maine, two bills are being considered that would seek to protect the state from some of the harms wrought in the immediate aftermath of 2020. One bill would make it a felony to threaten election workers or prevent them from doing their work. Another would ban groups from out of state from conducting post-election audits.
In Missouri, rally-goers recycled false claims about the “big lie” on Thursday. The event attracted around 100 attendees, including several Republican state representatives. Several top Missouri Republicans declined to attend including Secretary of State Jay Ashcroft (R). Ashcroft has however piggybacked off some of the false rhetoric surrounding the 2020 election to push an “election integrity” legislative agenda. The day before the rally, he announced the creation of a “countdown clock” to mark the number of days the Legislature has left to pass bills reflecting his agenda.
A Republican in Nebraska has introduced a bill that would make voter fraud a felony in the state. State Sen. Tom Briese says it’s a response to Jan. 6, which showed the consequences of lack of confidence in results. Those opposed say it’s a solution to a problem that doesn’t exist.

Good News of the Week

Georgia election workers Ruby Freeman and Wandrea “Shaye” Moss have filed a second defamation lawsuit, this time against Rudy Giuliani and One American News Network, for their repeated and false claims that the mother and daughter election workers engaged in ballot fraud while counting ballots in November 2020. The suit says the pair received “an immediate onslaught of violent and racist threats and harassment” as a result of the false claims. It further says they are “afraid to live normal lives.”

Tune In

On Jan. 20, I’ll join the Washington Post’s Margaret Sullivan and The Atlantic’s Barton Gellman in conversation with UCI law professor Rick Hasen. We’ll discuss “what role journalists can and should play in supporting free and fair elections in the United States given the risk of election subversion in light of events surrounding the 2020 election.” You can RSVP to the event here.

How Biden could use his bully pulpit to protect voting

2021-12-06T17:19:34+00:00

A version of this post was originally distributed in Votebeat’s weekly newsletter. Sign up here.

As I spent the last several days creating Votebeat’s training program on voting rights, election administration, and cybersecurity for our future reporters, one of the books I read was Jon Meacham’s The Soul of America: The Battle for Our Better Angels. It looks at the role of the U.S. president during times of crisis and provides an excellent primer on the unmatched ability of the bully pulpit to bring civil rights advances. I wanted, for once, to read something that might make me hopeful, and that might help me figure out how to frame the halting progress of the civil rights battle in the United States, which still hasn’t been won. The weight of history was a necessary counterbalance to this week’s news, which brought a gripping reminder of the treatment of two Georgia poll workers who are now suing the rightwing conspiracy site Gateway Pundit for inciting months of harassment.

Their treatment was vicious. The women were subjected to death threats and even home visits from Gateway Pundit readers convinced the women had counted fake ballots, though of course they hadn’t. “I want the defendants to know that my daughter and I are real people who deserve justice,” one of the poll workers, Ruby Freeman, said in a statement, “and I never want them to do this to anyone else.” A Gateway Pundit article last December that identified Freeman by name seemed to revel in the treatment she would face. Its headline: “What’s Up, Ruby? Crooked Operative Filmed Pulling Out Suitcases of Ballots in Georgia IS IDENTIFIED.”

When Meacham published his book in 2018, the phrase “the soul of America” was not yet well worn on the political circuit — at least in modern parlance. Joe Biden would later make the battle for this country’s identity a key axiom of his campaign, promising to “restore the soul of America” in his first speech as president-elect. It had been, Biden said, eroded over the last four years of incredible upheaval and bitterness. But these things have not abated, and the past 10 months have not shown the Biden administration rising to the occasion.

For example, last month Vice President Kamala Harris — who has been placed in charge of the White House’s voting efforts — held a teleconference with the hundreds of groups that have been agitating against restrictive voting bills passed by multiple state legislatures. The activists walked away having heard no plan for advancing federal voting legislation, which is just as stuck as it was when Biden took office. One participant told The Guardian, “She said her five-minute remarks, which were the ‘same-old, same old’, and then she left.” Cliff Albright, a co-founder of Black Voters Matter, said the meeting felt like a “check-the-box kind of a call.”

Even though he has labeled the current voting landscape “Jim Crow 2.0,” Biden has not seen fit to pressure his party into a consensus on how to fight it, nor craft narrowly tailored bills that stand better chances of passage, nor unflinchingly call Republicans to the mat for their baseless rhetoric on voting fraud. He has not openly advocated for an infusion of funds for elections, though he has spent much of his political capital on new infrastructure spending and new social and climate spending.

Meacham’s book shows that this is not how great presidents have defined themselves in history. The bully pulpit that Teddy Roosevelt made famous has, in each administration, taken on its own life. Strong presidents, mobilizing national sentiment and often grief, have been able to make extreme headway on civil rights. Woodrow Wilson was able to use this to push through women’s suffrage, calling it “a new and good thing in the world.” Lyndon B. Johnson was famously able to use the office to force civil rights legislation. And Trump — just as effectively — was able to use it to tear at the fabric of trust in our institutions, in a way that no other president had ever attempted. He continues to do so from outside of the White House.

Our time of crisis is the moment for Biden’s administration to wield this power effectively on the issue of voting. After nearly a year in office, Biden’s approval ratings are plummeting and he has made no progress in stemming the tide of conspiracy and hate pouring into elections. The voting bills Congress has written are not perfect, and were written before Biden took office. Rather than advocate for practical advances, even if not all can be achieved at once, Biden has allowed the voting rights debate to happen without forcefully moving the needle.

Such a thing is, of course, a tall order, but one that many presidents before him have faced. Wilson certainly did not begin his tenure as a warrior for women’s suffrage — the sustained demands of the suffragettes who endured forced feedings in prison gave him the courage. Johnson found his mission thrust forward by the assassination of JFK and by Bloody Sunday in Selma, lending him that fierce urgency the era demanded.

LBJ presented a stark contrast to Kennedy on civil rights, as James H. Rowe — a longtime Democratic strategist — noted. “A senator would come to Kennedy and say ‘I’d love to go along with you Mr. President, but it would give me serious trouble back home.’ Kennedy would always say ‘I understand.’ Now Johnson knew damn well the senator was going to tell him that, and he never let the senator get to the point of his troubles back home. He would tell them about the flag, and by God, the story of the country, and he’d get them by the lapels and they were out the door. That’s why he got so much done, so fast.”

It worked even with the most entrenched racists of the day. After Bloody Sunday, LBJ called Alabama Gov. George Wallace to the White House, demanding he allow the marchers to finish their march and offer them protection. When Wallace quibbled, LBJ said, “Don’t you shit me, George Wallace.” And, refusing to relent, asked him: “What do you want left after you, when you die? Do you want a great big marble announcement that reads, ‘George Wallace — he built.’ Or, do you want a little piece of scrawny pine board lying across that harsh caliche soil that reads, ‘George Wallace — He hated.”

Wallace gave in, and later remarked, “Hell, if I’d stayed in there much longer he’d have had me coming out for civil rights.”

And those instigating events are here now. Jan. 6, which many on the right would prefer to forget, was an unprecedented attack on our nation’s capital. When President Biden gave his inaugural address, fewer than 20 days removed from this fateful moment, it seemed as if he, too, may harness the power of the office. “Here we stand looking out to the great Mall where Dr. King spoke of his dream. Here we stand, where 108 years ago at another inaugural, thousands of protestors tried to block brave women from marching for the right to vote. Today, we mark the swearing-in of the first woman in American history elected to national office – Vice President Kamala Harris,” he said.

But in the months that have followed, Republicans have sought to minimize the harm of Jan. 6. And Democrats have allowed the debate over the future of voting to pass them by, not answering in equal measure the depth and severity of misinformation the right trumpets on a daily basis. It is hard to wield the power of the bully pulpit if you never stand at it. Biden, mimicking his presidential campaign, has done little to forcefully craft his own message on the issue. He has given fewer press conferences in his first year than any president in modern history, and it took him an unprecedented 65 days to offer his first.

This, after he set lofty goals for himself on voting. It is not that I am holding him to an unfair or arbitrary standard — presidents have faced bigger problems, and Biden told us that he, and he specifically, was cut out for this one. “For our democracy and the work — and to deliver our work and [for] our people, it’s up to all of us to protect that right,” he said at the National Constitution Center in July. He noted that election administrators had “withstood unrelenting political attacks, physical threats, intimidation, and pressure” in order to carry out the 2020 election, which saw record-breaking turnout. He called legislation that rolled voting back “the most dangerous threat to voting and the integrity of free and fair elections in our history.” It is one of only a small handful of comments Biden has made on the issue and one of even fewer speeches — a striking reversal given the stakes as he defined them.

In his memoirs, LBJ wrote presciently of the challenges of the presidency. “The job of the president is to set priorities for the nation, and he must set them according to his own judgement and his own conscience,” he wrote. “Every man who occupies this position has to strain to the utmost ability to fill it.”

If Biden truly believes that we are in a battle for our nation’s soul, and truly believes that voting is the a priori right that governs all others, then the time to fight for it and do so without compromise, surely, is now. If Biden chooses to harness this energy and attention he still has time to leave a legacy that will be enshrined by future historians. The soul of America is still on the table.

Back Then

In 1985, political scientist Peter H. Argersinger reexamined the accusations of voter fraud during the Gilded Age — a period lasting from around the 1870s to 1900, and the very name of which connotes images of rampant fraud and abuse as wealth in the United States swelled. But examining the allegations, Argersinger finds that they are “highly emotional” and often based on sweeping generalizations of how elite members of society believed lower classes behaved, rather than hard evidence. What is striking then, as now, is actually how little fraud occurred given the strikingly low levels of oversight, especially by today’s standards.

In Other Voting News

Former Wisconsin Supreme Court Justice Michael Gableman, who is now running the Republican-led investigation into the state’s 2020 election, has finally revealed whom taxpayers are paying to be on his staff. They include Trump administration official Andrew Kloster, who has repeatedly and falsely claimed that Trump won the 2020 election, and has been accused of accosting poll workers in Wisconsin while serving as a poll watcher. Gableman also turned heads this week when he insulted mayors in Wisconsin’s largest cities, the press and the “Zuckerberg money” he believes stole the election (the election was not stolen).
The city of Chandler, Arizona, is testing out mobile voting using blockchain technology. Mobile voting is not currently legal in the state, so Arizona would have to change the law before Chandler could fully implement the system. Last year several MIT professors found blockchain voting technology would “come at the cost of losing meaningful assurance that votes have been counted as they were cast, and not undetectably altered or discarded.” Most experts agree this technology will not make mobile voting secure, and that paper ballot backups are the only current way to ensure votes are counted as cast.
Mike Lindell continues to be a plague on the state of Washington. Washington Attorney General Bob Ferguson said his office was flooded with emails asking for his support of a draft lawsuit hosted on Lindell’s website. “I will not be doing that,” Ferguson tweeted.
The recent elections in New York City and New Jersey broke records, but not any good ones. Both were among the lowest turnouts in modern history.
Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger has filed suit against the U.S. Department of Justice related to what he says is a delay in returning his Freedom of Information Act request. The office filed a request for documents related to “whether the federal government is colluding or conspiring with outside groups to carry out a political agenda in suing over the state’s new election law.” The request seeks communication with Fair Fight Action, run by Stacey Abrams (who has just announced another run for governor); the Coalition for Good Governance; Latino Community Fund Georgia; and others.
Embattled Colorado clerk Tina Peters attracted a crowd of more than 100 supporters this week in Grand Junction. It was one of several public appearances Peters has made since being stripped of her duties and having her home raided by federal authorities after allegedly leaked secure information about her county’s election system. Things are carrying on without her. Wayne Williams, former Colorado secretary of state, is one of two people who took over election duties for Peters. He told local media the hand recount of November’s election is going smoothly and running ahead of schedule.

Good Idea of the Week

We have said it before and we’ll say it again: Hurray for efforts to recruit young poll workers. This time, kudos to the Kentucky Secretary of State’s office for launching a partnership with the Kentucky YMCA Youth Association, which will hold youth voter registration drives, voter education seminars and “increase teen civic activity” through poll worker registration. “Our base of volunteer poll workers is aging out, and this partnership will help us find new ones as we prepare for the 2022 elections,” said Secretary of State Michael Adams.

The legislative hot sauce on Texas’s election audit bill

2021-10-18T15:40:58+00:00

A version of this post was originally distributed in Votebeat’s weekly newsletter. Sign up here.

My heart, it breaks, because the focus this week is back on my home state of Texas. Houston state Sen. Paul Bettencourt has proposed a two-part bill, the second half of which is supported by Donald Trump and would require all of the counties to audit the 2020 election at a cost of, according to a nonprofit’s projection, $250 million. This is the high end of one estimate, but experts say an audit is not likely to be materially cheaper than that, especially when you factor in election equipment that might need to be replaced after third parties tinker with it — invalidating the machines’ certification — and the incredible workforce cost of conducting something like that in a state where 11.3 million people cast ballots last year.

Let’s stop to think how needless this gargantuan effort would be, considering that Trump won this state. If even a winning candidate can demand a recount, where does it end? At what point do we cut our elections administrators, and frankly our system of democracy, a damned break? The Texas House may be doing just that. While the Senate passed the bill last week, the House hasn’t taken it up. As I learned through my reporting during the last special session, House Republicans — buoyed by Speaker Dade Phelan — are reluctant to pass draconian voting legislation, and this moderating impulse is what kept much of the most heinous ideas out of the Texas election bill that passed this summer.

The first part of Bettencourt’s bill is, really, not that concerning, say experts I’ve spoken to. It creates a formal process by which a candidate, party chair, judge, or the leader of a political committee related to a ballot measure can formally ask the county for an explanation of an irregularity, which the county would have 20 days to provide. If they are not satisfied, they can ask the secretary of state’s office to look into the issue further. But the secretary of state’s office, historically, has agreed with the counties on election disputes. Many news outlets have characterized this section as recounts-on-demand, but that’s not my read of the bill. Before an audit could happen, the citizen would have to take their claim to the SOS’s office, which would determine if an audit was reasonable. The secretary of state has historically not bucked the decisions of counties, and voters can already come directly to the office with concerns. So while this might open the door to more audits, it doesn’t seem likely that these audits would spiral out of control.

Left-leaning activists have largely also ignored this section, but to the extent that they’ve acknowledged it, their criticism is the same as for the 2020 statewide audit: This would consume tons of time for county clerks, who would be forced to respond to politically motivated questions. But really, they are already doing that. The 20-day deadline to respond is double the amount of time that clerks get to respond to public records requests in Texas, and many of these questions could be answered through records or seeking this information without a formal process. Clerks already answer these requests, and have no formal way to proceed if the requestor disputes their findings. Now, the clerks do. They can send the request up to the secretary of state’s office, who will provide the same explanation but with more force.

State officials I’ve spoken to in Texas say this is a fine idea. But this section of the bill has been glossed over in news coverage and with Republicans who are discussing the bill — because of course, an impending audit that costs $250 million is going to overshadow a review procedure. (The same amount of money, per the budget passed this year, could fund the salaries, benefits, travel, and expenses of the entire workforce of the attorney general’s office.)

The 2020 audit was affixed to this bill in order to make it more salient during this very weird time in election politics — the first section, which would lead to transparency, is boring to the base. Slap an audit on there that Trump wants? It’s basically legislative hot sauce. It is a strange moment when Republicans are motivated by a deeply unnecessary and transformatively pricey government action. This feels like we’re in the twilight zone.

Let’s consider, for a moment, the logical extension of this type of messaging. On Wednesday, Donald Trump sent out a statement (since he can’t tweet anymore). It said, “Republicans will not be voting in ‘22 or ‘24” if the fraud his campaign “conclusively” documented is not dealt with. A spokesperson for Trump clarified: Trump wasn’t saying not to vote, she said, rather “if we don’t fix our elections, many voters will think their vote won’t count.”

Well, they already do. For instance, more than 750,000 Georgians who turned out for the November general stayed home for the Jan. 5 runoff. I was in the war room with the Georgia SOS staff as the results came in, sitting next to Secretary Brad Raffensperger, a Republican. When it was clear that both Democrats would be headed to the Senate, something initial results from the general election and polling did not anticipate, Raffensperger looked at me and said, “Trump did this.” And he did. Apparently he’ll keep doing it as long as Republicans stand by and say nothing, demanding audits even in states that he won.

I suppose that, yes, Trump did not literally tell Republicans, “Don’t vote” — he said that Republicans won’t vote. Trump’s team seems comfortable with this, but it’s not clear if they’re comfortable with repeatedly losing because their boss suppresses his own voters.

Back Then

Those who highlight accusations of fraud love to talk about the fraud that used to happen here. LBJ stuffed ballot boxes. Party bosses paid the poor. But what if the basis for these accusations was not as solid as many believe? Alexander Keyssar — my voting guide in all things — writes, “on the one hand, fraud and corruption clearly did exist: complaints came not only from upper-crust reformers but from labor organizations and Populists.” But, the reformers themselves had questionable motives: “Their antagonism towards poor, working-class, and foreign-born voters was thinly disguised at best, and many of them unabashedly welcomed the prospect of weeding such voters out of the electorate.” In recent years, political scientists have been studying this history more fully, and what they’ve found sounds eerily similar to today. Keyssar writes, “Most elections appear to have been honestly conducted: ballot-box stuffing, bribery, and intimidation were the exception, not the rule.”

In Other Voting News

Politico is out with a fascinating look into the (possible) future. If Trump runs again 2024 and wins, his call to “reform” elections to deal with “fraud” will become a full policy agenda - not just a talking point.
Yet another judge in Arizona has disagreed with Senate Republicans who continue to try and keep documents about the “audit” there secret. “It is hard to imagine more serious litigation than the disclosure of documents underlying an audit of the election of the president of the United States and a United States senator in Maricopa County,’’ Maricopa County Superior Court Judge Michael Kemp wrote.
Mesa County Clerk Tina Peters will not be allowed to manage her county’s election in November, a district court judge in Colorado has ruled. The judge found the state had sufficient evidence that Peters had “committed a breach and neglect of duty and other wrongful acts.” In a statement, Peters called the decision a “power grab” and said she intends to appeal.
Counties in Florida say they each need several thousands of additional dollars to comply with Florida’s new election law. At least one county is removing drop boxes in order to save money. In St. Augustine County, a right-leaning county, there will now be one drop box. In 2020, there were 10.
The national poll worker shortage has hit Ohio, where Secretary of State Frank LaRose says they are “putting out the help wanted sign” because the state is short a whopping 17,000 poll workers for its upcoming local elections. Poll workers in the state are paid about $200.
The ambition of the Republicans’ investigation of Wisconsin’s 2020 election seems to be shrinking. Election officials who were initially subpoenaed to testify will now provide documents instead, the AP reports. The lead investigator has said that those individuals who do not cooperate will be required to testify in person.
After an administratively smooth but politically chaotic recall election, California Democrats are now zeroing in on reforming the state’s century old rules governing the move. A special committee is reviewing the issue, and legislators anticipate seeing reform legislation during the 2022 session.
Trump supporters plan to go door to door looking for “ghost voters” in Michigan, who are alleged to have cast ballots despite not existing. No proof of this phenomenon has been found. Federal officials have already warned the move could constitute voter intimidation. A bill there that would only allow a provisional ballot to be counted if an ID is shown after it is cast, and removes exceptions to the ID rule in place is also now headed to the governor’s desk, though she is expected to veto it.
We’ve found it, the world’s greatest election headline: “Costume Confused For Election Drop Box Not Part Of Illegal Activity.” Apparently the folks who run Bucks Voices, an advocacy group in Bucks County, Pennsylvania, made — and I am not kidding at all — ballot box costumes so they could dance around in them to advocate for more drop boxes. If you don’t believe it, there is video. But one costume, which was apparently inadvertently left on the steps of the town hall, caused some confusion. Apparently voters thought it was real, and dropped six ballots in there, and someone complained to the local county attorney. The ballots have now been properly cast, and the county removed the cardboard costume, which, in fairness to Bucks Voices, was festooned with signs that said “COMING SOON.”

Good Idea of the Week

At our panel event this week, CTCL executive director Tiana Epps-Johnson and former secretary of state Trey Grayson touched on something we’ve talked a lot about in the Votebeat newsletter: The need for election administrators to be more transparent with the public about procedures and safeguards. And we have one great example of that. Benton County, Iowa held public tests of their voting machines on Monday, which they also streamed on Facebook Live. In the video, Gina Edler, the county’s auditor, and her deputy walk through every step of the process, showing the machines and the process of the logic testing, right there on the screen! The local news calls it “worth a watch,” and we agree! For the sake of voters, please do more of this!

Texas’s audit doesn’t resemble a “full forensic audit”

2021-10-04T14:56:28+00:00

A version of this post was originally distributed in Votebeat’s weekly newsletter. Sign up here.

You might remember that Texas announced last week that it would conduct a “forensic audit” of four counties — the two largest Democratic counties (Harris and Dallas) and the two largest Republican counties (Tarrant and Collin). The news came the same day former President Trump called on Gov. Greg Abbott to back new audits through the Legislature. Texas is conducting this review, however, under the secretary of state’s existing authority, and there is no sign Abbott will ask for legislation in the current special session — as Trump requested — to require an audit by law. Trump now says this was a mistake.

“By allowing the Democrats to do what they do, it will make it much harder for the Governor and other Republicans to win election in 2022 and into the future,” Trump told the Texas Tribune on Wednesday. “Texas is a much redder state than anyone knows, but this is the way to make sure it turns blue.”

The audit underway in Texas is hardly a “full forensic audit,” to the extent that phrase even has meaning. Guidance the secretary of state’s office put out this week detailed the extent of the audits, which include looking at only the information counties are already required to retain for 22 months under federal law. It’s not really clear what makes this “forensic” — this is pretty typical stuff. The counties will check voting machines, ballots, and accompanying material in ways that are essentially customary — a far cry from the chaos in Arizona, where an unqualified, privately funded contractor’s review was not customary at all. The counties have already done much of this since November; doing it again will be neither a large lift nor, most likely, particularly expensive. Costs are still being worked out, and the SOS’s office has said it *hopes* the legislature will cover them. The Legislature is in yet another special session to deal with redistricting, and in theory the costs would be covered by a bill Republicans introduce and pass during this time. The audits themselves are moving forward, regardless of who is left with the bill, because the SOS’s office already has the authority to order them.

But the way the audits are conducted isn’t really the point, is it? These audits will achieve no more security than is already built into the system. This appears to be simply a cynical optics ploy for Abbott, who is playing off of low confidence in the state’s election system to stoke his base during what has become a brutal race for his own reelection. The opportunity to fulfill Trump’s request — if only in spirit — was a gift for Abbott, who is being primaried hard from the right by two very Trumpy candidates, even though Abbott has already landed a Trump endorsement. Abbott isn’t very popular here, and he knows it.

This won’t be a Cyber Ninjas 2.0 story, and it probably won’t result in much legal drama — this is squarely within the SOS’s authority, no subpoenas necessary, and the audit seems straightforward and on par with industry standards. It will, however, distract the four largest counties in Texas all the way into spring 2022, which is how long this process is slotted to take. I don’t need to remind you all that 2022 is a federal election year, making this a pointless distraction when election administrators have more pressing issues. They do not have unlimited resources, and two of the most limited resources are people and time. In a year when every single local and state official should be mobilizing to encourage registration, implement the new district maps, and educate voters on the multitude of new election laws during a federal election cycle, they’re also required to do Trump’s bidding.

Back Then

Texas’s secession vote in 1861 was long plagued by accusations of voter fraud and allegations that Unionists were prevented from casting ballots through intimidation and creative electioneering. In 1991, historian Dale Baum attempted to use math to see if this was true. Turns out, it probably was — at least in a few counties, where he found that Union support was not reflected in voter turnout in significant ways. He looked at support for each side, local historical turnout, and final count, finding counties where stated support was substantially different than the ultimate voting result, given historical rates of turnout. His analysis found “corroborating evidence of apathy, intimidation, or possible ‘counting out’ of unionists in extreme northeastern Texas,” such as Bowie and Cass counties, and in Cameron County in the southeast. (Counting out is essentially tossing a ballot.) There were counties, such as Bexar and Kaufman, that experienced documented acts of secessionist intimidation but whose votes appear to have been counted appropriately. It is hard to know with certainty what happened these many years later, but the numbers Baum explores suggest that not all was above board. Funny how “audits” based on math actually uncover evidence of wrongdoing, huh?

In Other Voting News

Senate Republicans in Pennsylvania are continuing their election probe, despite the failure of the Arizona review to turn up … anything. In the House, Republicans are continuing to mull a variety of other voting changes they hope to enact via a proposed constitutional amendment.
The far-right website Gateway Pundit released a doctored version of Cyber Ninjas’ Arizona report. I know — knock me over with a feather. The false version called for the election to be decertified, a recommendation that Cyber Ninjas CEO Doug Logan says he never made. Meanwhile, if you are looking for a good fact-based explainer on everything Logan’s actual report got wrong, we can’t find a better one than over at the AP.
The Republican National Committee is suing two towns in Vermont — Montpelier and Winooski — which voted to allow legal resident noncitizens to vote in municipal elections. The RNC called the move “radical” and an attack on elections, which should be decided “solely by American citizens.” As I’ve written in this newsletter before, noncitizens voted in the United States into the 1920s. Arkansas was the last state to ban the practice in 1926. No part of the U.S. Constitution restricts voting to only citizens.
Wisconsin Gov. Tony Evers said this week that if he were a clerk he’d get “lawyered up,” to protect himself against claims of election rigging. It’s not a comforting thing for election officials to hear, given that they are already bailing on their jobs in frighteningly high numbers.
New Jersey’s elections officials are preparing to implement early in-person voting for the first time on brand new technology, all while experiencing a massive worker shortage. Oh, and by the way, the pandemic is still happening. NJ.com has a great rundown on the uphill battle local officials face as state elections approach.
Vox has a fascinating explainer on the intersection between the religious right and the push for suppressive voting legislation.
Navajo voting rights advocate and Arizona resident Agnes Laughter has died, she was 89. She was part of a 2004 lawsuit that led to the Department of Justice expanding the types of IDs that can serve as tribal identification at the polls nationwide. Laughter was also a renowned weaver. “Future generations will remember her as a protector of our right to vote and the beautiful Navajo rugs she created. The Navajo people are grateful for her courage,” tribal council Speaker Seth Damon said in a statement.

Just Listen

Please keep sending in your hobbyist submissions for me to feature in this space, but meanwhile we’ve got three podcast recommendations for ya:

Tyler Dukes, a fantastic journalist for the News & Observer in North Carolina, has released a podcast on redistricting in the Tar Heel State. It’s very good.
On The Media has a full episode out on election manipulation, misinformation, and more.
And The Daily is out with an episode on redistricting in New York. And isn’t that always a good time?

Why is Biden outraged about voting restrictions but not the filibuster?

2021-08-09T21:56:33+00:00

A version of this post was originally distributed in Votebeat’s weekly newsletter. Sign up here.

Democrats have restarted their push to pass federal voting legislation in the form of the John Lewis Voting Rights Bill, which would extend preclearance across the country, and Sen. Joe Manchin’s limited version of the For the People Act. The final version of Manchin’s slimmed-down bill is still under negotiation, and there has been no clarity on the plan for filibuster reform.

But the push for filibuster reform goes on, and it’s being boosted by a million-dollar ad buy from the political action committee End Citizens United. The ad notably sends the message straight to President Biden and does not name the senators—Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema—who are hesitant to change the filibuster rules. “President Biden, please tell the Senate: Reform the filibuster,” the ad says. “Everything is at stake.”

Focusing on Biden is an interesting move, especially since the White House has been the target of such advocacy for a while. Way back in March, Politico wrote that Biden’s “resistance to filibuster reform began to crack” because he realized his agenda was at risk if the filibuster continued in its current form. But then the tides shifted in early July, when White House press secretary Jen Psaki danced around three questions on filibuster reform, never committing to public advocacy. Days later, a speech Biden gave on voting rights made no mention of filibuster reform at all. And then, during a CNN town hall, he said ending the filibuster would “throw the entire Congress into chaos” and that “nothing at all will get done.” It was the firmest answer he’d given, and it wasn’t what advocates wanted to hear.

The White House has put itself in a quandary. In the CNN town hall and elsewhere, Biden has said the wave of restrictive voting legislation is the “most significant threat to our democracy since the Civil War.” But in the same conversations, he refuses to acknowledge what Democrats call the most significant roadblock to preventing that destruction. The White House cannot continue to have it both ways: If Republican changes to election laws could, as Biden repeatedly has claimed, imperil our democracy, does it matter that “nothing” will get done in Congress? It is either a cataclysmic problem that must be repaired with all possible speed, or it is not and filibuster reform is not worth it. Biden, it would seem, must take a clearer position to even clear the lowest possible political bar: making sense.

Of course, reforming the filibuster is not the same as ending the filibuster, but we’ve yet to see a coherent strategy for such reform — for example, specifically carving out civil rights issues or requiring fewer than 60 votes to end debate. If Senate Democrats don’t intend to craft a plan, then it seems that the White House, which has placed Vice President Kamala Harris in charge of fixing what they say is a crucial problem, should offer straightforward guidance. Until they do, this federal legislation isn’t going anywhere.

Back Then

Now, for some history. It often takes top-down, unexpected leadership for things to start shakin’, as my mother likes to say (the “start shakin’” part, not the unexpected leadership part, though I assume she’d agree). As we’ve discussed in this newsletter before, states were allowed full discretion in defining who made up the electorate. Sometimes, these rules differed for federal and local races. For example, in the mid-1800s in North Carolina, a surprise Whig candidate for governor named David S. Reid made suffrage a gigantic part of his platform. Because, in North Carolina, there was no property requirement for voting in gubernatorial races, he saw a swell of support from the landless and nabbed the office. He then made eliminating the property requirement in U.S. senatorial elections a huge part of his advocacy while governor, saying that the “elective franchise is the dearest right of an American citizen.” He found it particularly reprehensible that there were about 50,000 free white men in the state who were disenfranchised by the state’s Constitution in federal senatorial elections. This position had been a departure from the stance of the Whig party, which had previously declared mass enfranchisement “a system of communism unjust and Jacobinical.” Realizing that Reid’s appeal to voters was a political win, they quietly changed their position in the mid-1800s following his election to governor, and the property requirement was removed for senatorial elections in the state.

In Other Voting News

One reason the federal voting rights bill matters so much at the local level is, to take one example, the intractable conflict in Texas. Democratic lawmakers remain camped out in Washington, D.C., and Gov. Greg Abbott has announced the second special session. This will require the Senate — which has already passed the elections bill — to start all over again, but it may not matter if the House Democrats choose not to return. This could continue for a while, as Abbott has pledged to call as many sessions as necessary until the elections bill passes.
A group of Democratic lawmakers have introduced the “the Protecting Election Administration from Interference Act,” which would extend harassment and intimidation protections — which currently cover only poll workers — to election workers who count ballots and certify results.
Thursday was the anniversary of the passage of the Voting Rights Act, and to mark the occasion Attorney General Merrick Garland penned an op-ed in the Washington Post calling for lawmakers to pass federal legislation. After giving an account of the broad history of voting reforms, he writes, “we must say again that it is not right to erect barriers that make it harder for millions of eligible Americans to vote. And it is time for Congress to act again to protect that fundamental right.”
A Republican lawmaker in Wisconsin has attempted to seize ballots and machines in Milwaukee and Brown counties for an inspection, issuing subpoenas that may or may not be legally valid. They were issued by Rep. Janel Brandtjen, the chairwoman of the Assembly Elections Committee, who told a group of supporters, “This is not something that we’re going to be doing just in 2020. We’re going to be doing it every year going forward.”
Conservatives in Nebraska have been trying to get a voter ID bill passed for years, but it has always stalled in committee. Now, a group called Citizens for Voter ID has mounted a campaign to bring the choice straight to the people by putting a constitutional amendment up for consideration in 2022.
The Maryland Board of Elections has finally settled a longstanding dispute with disability groups in the state that say the ballot-marking devices used by voters with disabilities require them to cast “segregated ballots.” These machines produced a ballot of a different size than those voters cast on paper. The MBOE has agreed to make several accommodations, including adding machines for use by disabled voters and instructing more voters to cast ballots on the same machines, which can be and often are used by all voters regardless of ability. Poll workers will also be instructed not to discourage the use of these devices.
The Department of Justice has entered a consent decree with the state of New Jersey that will make voter registration available at the state’s disability transportation services locations, which is required under federal law. At issue were widely used transportation systems, like NJ Transit Access Link and the Community Transportation network, which were not offering voter registration options. “The right to vote is a constitutional principle that forms a cornerstone of our democracy,” said acting U.S. Attorney Rachael Honig. “We appreciate that the State of New Jersey has worked with us to ensure that all New Jersey residents, including those with disabilities, enjoy convenient opportunities to register to vote.”

The Texas election bill contains a new obstacle to voting that almost no one is talking about

2021-07-26T20:02:00+00:00

This article was co-published with Texas Monthly.

There’s a problem buried inside Texas’s latest election bill, and it’s not one of the headline-grabbing restrictions that have torn the Legislature apart during the special session. Nonetheless, it could disenfranchise a significant number of the state’s voters.

Amid all the fighting, most lawmakers have apparently overlooked a provision that would force counties to automatically reject some mail-in ballot applications. Here’s why: The Republican-authored legislation would require voters to submit either their driver’s license number or a partial Social Security number when applying to vote by mail. That number would then be cross-checked with the state’s voter-registration database. Most applicants would be fine, because almost 90 percent of all registered Texas voters have both their Social Security number and driver’s license number in the database. However, 1.9 million voters—about 11 percent of the total—have only one of the two numbers on file with the state.

During late-night testimony to a committee of the Texas House on July 10, Chris Davis, the elections administrator for Williamson County, explained that most of the voters with only one number on file wouldn’t remember which number they filed, often many years earlier, and would have to guess. “You have a 50 percent chance of the voter guessing wrong,” said Davis. Guess wrong and your application would be rejected, even if it’s been twenty years since you used your Social Security or driver’s license number to register to vote. “I challenge any person on the committee: do you remember what you filled out when you got your voter registration? I certainly don’t. And I’m in the business of this. And if [the numbers] don’t match, we’re rejecting.”

Some 11 percent of Texas voters cast their ballots by mail in 2020, so if that percentage held up in future elections, 209,000 of the 1.9 million voters with only one ID number on file with the state would be requesting mail-in ballots. If most of those voters are guessing which ID number to cite on their application, and they have a 50 percent chance of guessing correctly, then 104,500 of them would have their applications rejected. Some of these voters might find other ways to vote, including in person. But some with serious disabilities, or those who have to be out of state during the period when polls are open, would be out of luck.

Ever since the special legislative session began this month, a handful of local and state officials have tried in vain to call attention to the problem. But their pleas appear to have fallen on deaf ears. The night of the hearing, none of the fifteen House committee members—including six Democrats—asked Davis a question about the risks of ID-matching. Instead, they voted the bill out of committee with no changes. Two days later, the full Senate adopted a nearly identical companion bill, also with no discussion and no changes to the provision.

During the regular session, which stretched from January through May, Texas was the focus of international attention as Republicans tried to push through what voting rights groups and Democrats labeled voter suppression and Jim Crow 2.0, a reference to state laws, especially in the South, that discriminated against Blacks from the 1870s until the 1960s. In its final iteration, the proposal contained eleventh-hour provisions that would have limited Sunday voting and made it easier for judges to overturn elections. After Democrats left the Capitol during the final days of the session to deprive Republicans of the quorum required to pass legislation, the bill died and Governor Greg Abbott quickly called the Legislature back for the thirty-day special session currently underway.

Ultimately no Republicans involved in the crafting of the bill took responsibility for the last-minute additions, but leaders in the House and Senate pledged to keep the objectionable Sunday-voting and overturning-elections measures out of any future legislation. Less noticed were other flaws. First during the regular session and then again in the ongoing special session, the authors of the “election integrity” legislation increasingly weakened crucial guardrails protecting the security of mail ballots. In addition to the new ID-matching requirements, it now contains a flawed way for voters to “cure,” or fix, a rejected mail-in ballot.

Enrique Marquez, spokesperson for House Speaker Dade Phelan, declined to answer questions about why the House moved the bill forward without addressing the ID-matching and curing issues, nor would he say whether there was any specific plan for addressing these issues if the House Democrats return to Austin. “There are no bills that can be considered on the floor until Democrats return home,” Marquez wrote in an email. “However, House Bill 3 author Andrew Murr has repeatedly stated he will work with all his colleagues to make the best bill possible.” (Murr’s chief of staff said Murr was aware of the problem and “looked forward to working with colleagues about remedying concerns about how differing numbers could result in a ballot not being counted.”)

Davis said many Republicans have failed to listen to the complaints of election officials, ignoring suggestions for improvements to nonpartisan, process-related issues. “It’s just like ‘Who is steering this bus?’” Davis told me. “They are following the pattern of only listening to their ‘the steal is real’ base and not consulting with any county elections officers.”

Davis said that while he decided to testify before the House, he chose not to give testimony before the Senate because Bryan Hughes, a Mineola Republican who chairs the State Affairs Committee, had brushed him off so many times before. Davis said he reached out to Hughes’s office about the ID-matching problem multiple times, but never received confirmation that a fix was in the works. Two legislative staffers, one working for a Republican and one for a Democrat, confirmed that the Texas secretary of state’s office had also advised legislators that the ID-matching provision needed to contain a failsafe for voters who do not have both numbers in the registration system, but the changes were never made. The staffers requested anonymity because they were not authorized to speak about negotiations. “Why are [election administrators] going to waste our time testifying?” asked Davis, who was appointed to his nonpartisan job by the Williamson County Commissioners’ Court. “They don’t care what we have to say. They haven’t from the beginning.”

County election administrators say the ID-matching provision imposes significant burdens on their offices, and they are unclear how to enforce it. Under the new language, the ID number—either a partial Social Security number or a driver’s license number—would have to be written on the envelope, forcing counties to spend thousands of dollars redesigning envelopes in order to accommodate a privacy flap that poll workers would peek under to check the number. “We’ve joked about whether it should be a scratch-off,” Davis said. If poll workers make an error or if voters, for example, transpose two numbers by accident, the application would be rejected with little opportunity for the voter to address the problem. “We don’t have time for that,” Davis said. “We’re getting down to registration deadlines by the time we receive a lot of these. There’s no time for the voter to mail another one.”

Texas Monthly and the nonprofit election-integrity news project Votebeat, who are jointly publishing this story, asked for interviews with Abbott, Hughes, House Elections Committee chairman Briscoe Cain, and Lieutenant Governor Dan Patrick, but none responded by press time. Republican representative Travis Clardy, who sits on the committee hearing the election bill in the House, said he preferred to deal with the problems once the proposal reaches the full House. “My expectation was and is—if we are able to establish a quorum again—that [the fixes] would be something we would consider,” he said. “I don’t see anybody getting locked up on that.”

There are other potential deficiencies in the ballot security measures buried in the legislation, despite GOP pledges to make elections more secure and safe from fraud. One of the most common security measures for protecting the integrity of the mail-in ballot involves signatures. Under current Texas law, voters must sign the envelope they use to send in their ballot. Then a committee of untrained volunteers recruited by the local election administrator reviews the signature to see if it matches the signature on file with the county. If the committee decides the signatures don’t match, the ballot is immediately rejected. There is widespread recognition that the lack of an appeals or correction process—or “ballot curing”—is an oversight in Texas law and the courts have pressured the state to join the eighteen other states that allow ballot curing.

In May, during the regular session, both Republicans and Democrats agreed to add a provision to the election bill, now in the special session version, which creates a ballot-curing process but contains ambiguous rules and few options for voters. It’s also unclear whether this process would be extended to absentee ballot applications rejected for ID mismatches—even as legislators put far more emphasis on matching those numbers than on matching signatures. The current special session version of the elections bill allows ballots and applications whose numbers do match to skip the signature-verification process entirely. But what happens if the numbers don’t match? The ballot is immediately rejected, and the bill is unclear on whether voters can appeal those rejections. “They created this new language on curing ballots, but we may never get to that step,” said Davis. In other words, Republicans built contradictory provisions into their bill—whether intentionally or unintentionally—creating a solution to a problem that may no longer exist while also creating a new problem.

“Curing is critical to security,” said Tammy Patrick, a mail-ballot expert and senior adviser to the elections project at the Washington, D.C.–based Democracy Fund, a foundation aimed at improving the democratic process. Allowing voters to correct rejected ballots is obviously beneficial to voters. But it also allows election workers to determine if a mismatched signature is evidence of fraud or an innocent mistake. If there is widespread voter fraud, as many Republican officials believe, then the ballot-curing process could help root it out, though election administrators say they are far more concerned about a rash of needlessly rejected ballots.

“I used to make those calls [in Arizona] and every time the answer was that they had just suffered a stroke or their arm was in a cast or they signed the envelope on the dashboard of the car while driving to drop it off,” Patrick said. “It was important to know why those signatures mismatched rather than leave that question unanswered.”

The bill’s current ballot-curing language differs slightly between the House and the Senate. While the House version indicates that counties must institute a process for curing rejected ballots, the Senate’s version makes the process optional, eliminating the ability to achieve consistency among counties—one of the major motivations for House Republicans. “Consistency and clarity was the goal,” said Clardy. “It should be the same in every county.”

Both bills provide few options for voters to appeal the decision to reject their ballots. One option allows local officials to mail the suspect ballot back to the voter, who would then send in a corrected version—a shaky prospect, especially for voters who are out of state at election time, given the U.S. Postal Service’s slow delivery performance in recent years. Another option allows voters to return ballots in person, which would not be possible for homebound or far-flung voters. Other states such as North Carolina and Arizona allow far more options, including resolving the matter over the phone or by email.

Several Republican House members including Clardy, Charlie Geren, Jacey Jetton, and Matt Shaheen, said in interviews that they’d prefer the ballot-curing provision be mandatory. Clardy called the opportunity to appeal a rejected ballot a “fundamental issue of fairness.” He added: “This is one of those areas—and I’m glad you pointed it out—that we would want correcting language for.”

But it’s unclear why the authors have designed a ballot-curing process that focuses so much on signatures. After all, if the current proposal becomes law, “signature matching goes the way of the dinosaur” anyway, said Davis. Election administrators, including Davis, said they do not understand how the ID-matching section will impact the ballot-curing process, or how many ballots might even make it to the newly crafted curing process at all. No legislator was able to explain it either.

This is why you check with election administrators before you draft a bill

2021-07-24T19:57:00+00:00

A version of this post was originally distributed in Votebeat’s weekly newsletter. Sign up here.

Here at Votebeat, we’ve been saying it for a while: Before you draft legislation about elections, you should probably, IDK, consult with an election administrator to check whether you’re about to disenfranchise thousands of people due to a technicality. We found out about such a wrinkle in Texas’s election bill and covered it for our partners at Texas Monthly.

A quick summary: Texas lawmakers, apparently without most of them realizing it, included a new provision in the election bill that has implications for as many as 1.9 million Texas voters, about 11 percent of the state’s voting population. Why? Because it would beef up ID requirements for absentee ballot applications, requiring voters to provide either a partial Social Security number or a driver’s license number. The county then compares that number to the identification number on file in the voter registration system. But those nearly 2 million Texans only have one of those two numbers in the system, not both. So, if they guess wrong when they apply — easily possible if they registered to vote years before — their application would be immediately rejected with no clear way to appeal.

Texas lawmakers were made aware of this problem. Chris Davis, the elections director in Williamson County, testified before the House committee and urged them to address it. “I challenge any person on the committee: Do you remember what you filled out when you got your voter registration?” he asked. “I certainly don’t. And I’m in the business of this. And if they don’t match, we’re rejecting.”

Nonetheless, the committee passed the bill without any changes. Two days later, the full Senate passed its version of the bill, which also contains the provision. Now, the only way to address the problem is to hope that the full House decides to amend the legislation. The problem? Most House Democrats, obviously, aren’t even in the state to enable a quorum. The bill in some form will pass eventually, of course, because the Democrats cannot stay away forever and Gov. Greg Abbott has pledged to call as many special sessions as necessary.

Several Republicans told Votebeat it was not the intent of the bill to, as one put it, “make registration into a game of gotcha.” He expected they would fix the problem once the bill was heard on the floor of the House. We shall see!

Back Then

Now, for some history. States have been worried about absentee ballot fraud since absentee ballots were devised as a way for Civil War soldiers to cast ballots away from home. By the early 1900s, most states allowed voters some ability to cast ballots by mail, and in many states anyone could do so if they were away from their home on Election Day for any reason. As the practice grew, the concerns over fraud did as well. But one notable exception was for soldiers. Many of the common security measures for mailed ballots — such as strict chain-of-custody procedures or witness requirements — were suspended for soldiers’ ballots, and courts gave extremely wide latitude toward the process for collecting and counting them. One New York court in 1917 wrote, “every reasonable facility should be provided for the casting and canvassing of [soldiers’] votes without the strict application of all the formalities provided by the election law.”

In Other Voting News

Partisan-audit-mania is spreading to Texas. Several Republicans in the quorum-less House of Representatives support a new bill that would conduct third-party audits of the 2020 election results in the 13 counties with populations greater than 415,000. (Biden was the winner in 10 of those.)
The consequences of these partisan audits are coming to bear in Pennsylvania, where the acting secretary of state decertified one county’s voting machines this week. Fulton County allowed a third-party company to inspect its voting equipment in December at the request of Republican state Sens. Doug Mastriano and Judy Ward, who have been on a mission to conduct forensic audits around the state. Even Republican Rep. Seth Grove agreed with the SoS that the county erred in turning over the machines and must pay the price (about $25,000). “Fulton County will have to buy new machines at the expense of Fulton County taxpayers,” Grove said.
Also in Pennsylvania, a compromise could be on the horizon over the Republicans’ once-vetoed election bill. Democratic Gov. Tom Wolf said he’s open to a version of a new voter ID requirement, so long as it wouldn’t suppress the vote, as he asserted the GOP’s law would have. It’s still unclear whether Democrats and Republicans will finally negotiate on legislation that stands a chance of passage—even as productive offerings for voters, like early in-person voting, and for administrators, like pre-canvassing, are on the line.
There’s new evidence from Arizona that voting fraud was extremely rare in 2020. The AP collected county records for any incidents of suspected fraud it could find, and tallied 182 cases that have been forwarded to prosecutors to investigate. Of those, charges have been filed in four cases. None has led to a conviction yet. A vast majority of the cases originated in Pima County, which pursues suspected fraud aggressively. Eleven counties had not referred any cases to prosecutors.
The “certified fraud examiner” hired by the sheriff of Barry County, Michigan, to investigate voter fraud in the 2020 election has so far attempted to question at least six township clerks. The sheriff, who has ties to Donald Trump’s legal team, says he’s not using county funds to pay the private investigator but that a county deputy is assisting him. One prominent elections expert this week called the effort “law enforcement malpractice.”
An activist has sued the Kansas Secretary of State’s office over its deletion of a statewide database of those voters whose provisional ballots were rejected. Last year, the same activist sued for access to the list, which he was granted by a court. This year, when he asked for 2020 data, he was told the office no longer had the ability to produce the data. The ACLU, which sued on his behalf, alleges that Secretary Scott Schwab, a Republican, unlawfully withheld the information and, upon losing the lawsuit, made it impossible to get the information in the future. Schwab told the Kansas City Star the information was not useful to his office and he was not obligated to maintain it.
New Mexico Secretary of State Maggie Toulouse-Oliver has issued a plan to install dropboxes, bolted to the ground and with 24-hour video surveillance, across the state. The Republican Party is opposed to the plan, which they say will increase fraud (though they presented no evidence of any such history). The dropboxes should be “in place in time for local elections this fall.” The New Mexico legislature voted to allow the installation of such drop boxes in 2019, but the funding never materialized. The secretary’s office told the Albuquerque Journal it had secured a mix of federal and state funds to make the program possible.

How long can Texas Democrats stay together and stay away?

2021-07-17T19:49:00+00:00

A version of this post was originally distributed in Votebeat’s weekly newsletter. Sign up here.

For the second week in a row, Texas politics has boiled over. On Monday, Votebeat broke the news that dozens of Democrats in the state House would board two private jets bound for D.C., breaking quorum in the special legislative session and preventing the Republicans’ voting bill, among their other prized legislation, from passing. We covered the news with our partners at Texas Monthly, where we’ll be continuing our coverage of the fallout in the coming weeks.

The Democrats told me they know they can’t stay away forever — being a Texas representative pays only $6,000 a year, and they work only six months every two years. They have kids, jobs and lives that may need their attention, and the moment they step foot back into the state, law enforcement officers can forcibly return them to the capitol. Their strategy only works as long as they stay unified (which isn’t a given) and only as long as none of the more than 50 of them breaks ranks and returns home. “We are going to D.C. to plead with members of Congress to pass voting rights legislation. That’s the only way to ultimately prevail in Texas — we can only hold the line for so long,” Rep. Gina Hinojosa, who represents part of the Austin area, told me.

I talked in depth with Slate’s What Next podcast about the walkout this week. Learn more about the Democrats’ political calculus: Is the goal forcing federal voting rights legislation through Congress or moderating Texas’s? These Democrats are divided over that question. What can Republicans do next? Hoot and holler for now, mostly, but eventually Gov. Greg Abbott can call a bunch of other special sessions, and the bill will pass.

Back Then

Walkouts are uncommon in Texas legislative history, happening about once in a generation. The last time this happened was in 2003 and also concerned voting: Senate Democrats bolted over redistricting maps, which they argued (and the state’s Supreme Court would later partially agree) were racially gerrymandered. They left in chartered buses (not planes) and went to Oklahoma and New Mexico (not D.C.). It was a rush job, and voting rights were not the issue du jour they are in 2021. Then, the media had a field day making fun of the Dems: “Outgunned, Texas Democrats Vamoose,” read an L.A. Times headline seething with fake Texas-isms. A Washington Post article described them as, “staying in a Holiday Inn and holding court at Denny’s.” Other articles referred to them as “escapees” or “fugitives,” while editorial boards across the country decried the move as cowardly. This time is different. MSNBC will hold a town hall with the Democrats camped out in D.C. Monday night to discuss voting rights, giving them more national attention than the Texas House has had in years, and the Washington Post’s editorial board penned an editorial decrying the voting bill in Texas hours following the walkout.

In Other Voting News

One of the Texas Democrats’ goals while in D.C. is to pressure Sen. Joe Manchin to more forcefully support a federal voting rights bill, one that they hope won’t meet the same fate the For the People Act did. It appears they may be swaying him. Meanwhile, new pressure on the Senate is coming from 150 U.S. companies nationwide, including Tesla, Starbucks, Target, and all the major tech companies. Those corporate leaders signed onto a letter demanding that Congress restore federal protections to the Voting Rights Act, a la the still-stalled John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act. “Legislation amending the Voting Rights Act must help ensure that voters of color who remain the targets of voter suppression have equal and unfettered access to the democratic process,” the letter reads.
This week we saw signs of yet another twist in Arizona Republicans’ partisan audit of Maricopa’s ballots. Senate President Karen Fann held a kind-of hearing Thursday about the status of the forensic ballot review. The public, live-streamed Q&A convened in a Senate committee room, but it was not on the agenda of any specific committee, and Fann arranged for only herself and Republican Sen. Warren Petersen to sit at the dais and ask questions. (Senate Democrats were invited to view the proceedings from the floor alongside the public.) Under Fann’s questioning, Cyber Ninjas CEO Doug Logan alleged discrepancies between the ballot counts his team has logged and Maricopa County’s official numbers. For instance, he claimed 74,000 more mail-in ballots were tabulated than the county actually mailed out. Maricopa County countered that any difference is easily explained by ballots cast early in person at vote centers and that Logan was comparing the wrong figures anyway. Audit liaison Ken Bennett then asked Fann to force Maricopa to hand over additional election materials, and Logan urged her to authorize his team to conduct door-to-door canvassing of voters.
Earlier that day, a Maricopa County Superior Court judge ruled that the Senate cannot continue to let Cyber Ninjas keep details about their work secret. Exempting the contractors’ internal documents from public records law “would be an absurd result and undermine Arizona’s strong public policy in favor of permitting access to records reflecting governmental activity,” the judge wrote, adding that the public also has a right to know who the undisclosed funders of the audit are. Meanwhile, Democrats in the U.S. House of Representatives launched an investigation into Arizona’s audit, including a formal request for documents from Logan.
A state senator’s crusade in Pennsylvania to launch an Arizona-style forensic audit of ballots in three counties is meeting major resistance, including from Republicans in those counties. Sen. Doug Mastriano, who is perhaps Trump’s favorite acolyte in Pennsylvania, is seeking access to ballots, records, and voting machines in York, Tioga, and Philadelphia counties. Pennsylvania’s acting secretary of state has forbidden the counties from cooperating, and they seem eager to heed that directive.
North Carolina’s Board of Elections shot down a request by conservative state legislators to inspect voting machines in randomly selected precincts to see if any contain modems. The state board is also warning counties not to comply with any requests to inspect their voting equipment.
Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger has called for the resignations of two Fulton County election officials, both Democrats. Raffensperger, a Republican running for re-election, says Fulton elections director Rick Barron and registration chief Ralph Jones need to be held accountable for “continued failures.” Barron and Jones have already survived previous Republican calls for their resignation and have been continually protected by the Fulton County commission’s Democratic chairman. Raffensperger’s complaint comes after plaintiffs in a lawsuit against Fulton County recently discovered a mistake in which a Fulton election worker initially double-counted 200 ballots in November (a very small number of ballots, which apparently were counted correctly in the subsequent recounts). The claim then featured in a new baseless rant by Tucker Carlson this week about fraud.
The Michigan lawyer behind the dismissed Antrim County lawsuit is now running for state attorney general. Matthew DePerno’s pro-Trump conspiracy theories about rigged Dominion algorithms were debunked in court and by a Republican-led Senate investigation. His candidacy is part of a movement by proponents of Trump’s “big lie” to run for office and potentially influence future elections, including secretary of state challengers in Arizona, Michigan, Georgia, and Nevada.

Behind the scenes of the latest walkout by Texas Democrats over the GOP’s voting bill

2021-07-12T22:20:00+00:00

This article was co-published with Texas Monthly.

Representative Gina Hinojosa packed in a hurry this morning, stuffing a bag with enough clothes for weeks away from home, just moments before she left her house in Austin. “I can’t talk right now!” the 47-year-old Democrat said, as she zipped up her suitcase. By the afternoon, she sat on a chartered jet packed with dozens of her fellow Texas Democrats, ready to fly to Washington, D.C., in their latest ploy to block Republicans from passing new restrictions on voting.

Just 42 days before, Hinojosa had been one of dozens of Democrats to “break quorum” by absenting themselves from the Capitol at the end of the regular legislative session, denying Governor Greg Abbott and the Republican-controlled Legislature the ability to pass Senate Bill 7, legislation that would have further restricted voting in a state where access to the ballot box is already among the tightest in the nation. Now, five days into the Abbott-called special session of the legislature, the House Democrats were jetting off to D.C. to deny a vote on SB 7’s successor.

“Can we talk once the plane takes off?!” she shouted to those around her while I was on the line. Overhead announcements interrupted the call, and Hinojosa took a deep breath. “Logistics and organizing have taken every waking moment. I don’t even know what’s in my suitcase right now.”

The Democrats understand that the legislative showdown is about more than an election bill in Texas. Whether they like it or not, the special session debate has become a symbol for the battle for the future of voting rights in America, and they’ve been cast as the defenders of that right. But given their weak political position in the state, it’s not a battle they can wage in the traditional way. Hence, their decision to skip town: fighting by fleeing.

The destination for their exodus—Washington, D.C.—says a lot about where they see the main conflict over voting rights playing out. The walkout, which nearly sixty Democrats are participating in, had been discussed in hushed whispers at the Capitol for several days, but not even Hinojosa knew exactly when it would happen. After grueling hearings in both the Senate and the House, where public testimony went through the night, Republicans in the House and the Senate voted to advance each chamber’s version of the bill, despite what Hinojosa called “overwhelming opposition” from members of the public who waited hours to testify overnight. “We decided it was time to go, our voices were not being heard, and our constituents’ voices were not being heard,” said Hinojosa. “We can prevail on this in Washington.”

She knows that this fight isn’t over — Abbott can call as many special sessions as he likes and if, or when, a quorum is restored, passage is all but assured. So what do she and her colleagues hope to accomplish? “We are going to D.C. to plead with members of Congress to pass voting rights legislation. That’s the only way to ultimately prevail in Texas—we can only hold the line for so long,” she said.

House Speaker Dade Phelan, Lieutenant Governor Dan Patrick, and Abbott did not respond to requests for interviews by press time. But many Republicans are slamming the Democrats for leaving the state. “As they fly across the country on cushy private planes, they leave undone issues that can help their districts and our state,” said Abbott in a press release. In a written statement, Phelan said the House would use “all available resources” to restore a quorum. “I expect all Members to be present in our Capitol in order to immediately get to work on these issues.”

Though Phelan didn’t say so explicitly, he has the power under Texas law to call for a vote that allows him to lock the doors to the House floor and have state troopers round up missing representatives to restore a quorum. Hinojosa said that because the troopers have no jurisdiction outside of Texas the Democratic legislators “will stay in D.C. until our job is done.”

The voting-restriction bill, as reintroduced by Republicans in the House and the Senate, removed some of the more draconian provisions that emerged in the final hours of the regular session. It excised, for example, a provision that would have limited Sunday voting (widely used by Black voters) and language that would have made it easier for judges to overturn the results of an election.

Royce West, a Democratic state senator from Dallas, said that while the current version of the bill is “better” than the previous one, it still needlessly restricts the franchise. “They are saying it’s about security and accessibility, but they aren’t trying to make voting more accessible,” he said. Instead, he argues, the legislation amounts to a thinly veiled attempt at reducing turnout, especially in urban areas and minority communities that tend to vote for Democrats.

Former El Paso congressman Beto O’Rourke said Saturday that he hoped a walkout would ramp up pressure on Congress. “[They should] camp out on the steps of the U.S. Senate, so that every time one of those senators walks by they have to see a Texas state legislator who can’t even go home to their kids because they were willing to sacrifice for democracy, and to say to that senator, ‘You have the power to make this right. Will you use it?’” said O’Rourke, who campaigned unsuccessfully for U.S. Senate and for president and now runs a political action committee focused on voting issues.

O’Rourke said that his frustration with D.C. politicians grew as he watched Texans turn out to testify against the bill in Austin amid foul weather at 7 a.m. on a Saturday. “They made it through rain on a Saturday morning and waited for 11 hours to testify to get their 2 minutes to say their piece. They’re not cynical,” he said. “They are not throwing in the towel. They are not saying, ‘Well, shit, the traditions of the Senate don’t allow us to do X, Y, or Z.”

Outnumbered in the Legislature for almost two decades, Texas Democrats have occasionally resorted to breaking quorum to combat measures they view as existential threats to their power and democratic governance. In 2003, for example, more than fifty Democrats fled to New Mexico and Oklahoma to block a redistricting proposal engineered by former U.S. House Majority Leader Tom DeLay. The most recent quorum break came in late May, in the waning hours of the regular legislative session, when House Democrats walked out of the lower chamber to deny the Republican majority the 101 members who must be in attendance before a vote can be held. Then, members simply had to leave the building, rather than the state. Republican Speaker Dade Phelan had addressed the Democratic caucus that night, telling them that he “understood” if they needed to walk out, and that he would not send state troopers to collect them.

The 2003 walkout was deeply unpopular in the state. State Senate Republicans distributed playing cards with Democratic lawmakers displayed in the manner of Iraqi war criminals, with “Most Wanted Democrats” emblazoned on the top. The Washington Post described the representatives as “holed up just over the border in Oklahoma, where they were staying in a Holiday Inn and holding court at Denny’s.”

The Republicans then needed only one Democrat to defect, and they found their man in Houston Democrat Sen. John Whitmire, who returned from Oklahoma and to the floor. Democrats had no exit strategy, he explained to reporters at the time. With a quorum restored, the Republican redistricting plan passed. This time, public sentiment is far different. News of the walkout was met with praise from activists and celebrities on Twitter on Monday, though it’s not clear how the Texas electorate will receive the news. Hinojosa said she expects the support to continue. But public sentiment doesn’t make walking out on the job easier. “Leaving is really hard to do,” said Hinojosa, whose elementary-school-aged son snapped cell-phone photos of her while we talked. “Most members have to leave families behind for a long time, and then people have to get back to their full-time work so it’s hard to talk about having to seek refuge somewhere for weeks at a time.”

But Hinojosa is hopeful that the Texas Democrats’ dramatic departure to D.C. will force their party’s members in Congress. After their walkout during the regular session, a group of Texas legislators — including Hinojosa — flew to D.C. to meet with Vice President Kamala Harris and Democratic legislators, including Joe Manchin, the West Virginia senator who opposes reforming the filibuster, thereby making it impossible to pass legislation that can’t win the support of at least 10 Republican Senator . In the meetings, most national Democrats implored them to keep the pressure on, and to help them garner support for federal voting laws with their constituents and Democrats in other states.

Hinojosa said that Harris told them the eyes of the country were on them. “She said, ‘Look you need to understand you are now national leaders on voting rights – I know you are tired, but we need you to keep fighting,’” said Hinojosa. “And we took it to heart.” Hinojosa took her advocacy to Manchin’s home state, attending a voting rights rally last month in West Virginia. Now that she’s done her part, she says it’s time for her national counterparts to keep up their end of the bargain. “We can win on this in Washington. This is a foundational right from which all other rights come, so we won’t back down,” she said.

But others are skeptical about how this will all play out. Almost 20 years after bringing the 2003 quorum-break to an end, Whitmire is still in the Senate and possibly running for mayor of Houston. While today’s walkout included only House members, there is internal speculation among Democrats that the Senate may follow. In a call on Monday afternoon, Whitmire said he is not aware of firm plans for senators to leave. He said he would want a “definitive answer” on an “exit strategy” before he made his own choice to leave the state.

“I think you have to weigh all of your options,” he said, “and certainly I am keeping mine open.”

Texas embarks on a redo of its voting bill

2021-07-10T23:17:00+00:00

A version of this post was originally distributed in Votebeat’s weekly newsletter. Sign up here.

Texas, my beloved home state, is at it again. As expected, Gov. Greg Abbott called for reviving Republicans’ voting bill in the state’s special session, which began Thursday.

The House and the Senate will have public hearings Saturday on the election bill that became top of mind for the entire country after Texas House Democrats walked off the floor at the close of the regular session, breaking quorum and ending the session early to prevent its passage. Both chambers are expected to go late into Saturday night, if not all night. “The caucus is providing breakfast, lunch, dinner and then breakfast again, if that tells you anything,” said one Democrat. (Votebeat will be covering the special session with our partner the Texas Monthly, so stay tuned on both sites for in-depth coverage of the legislative maneuverings.)

The text of the bills reintroduced Thursday make clear that Republicans are far more in sync than they were at the close of the regular session. During that standoff in late May, a group of GOP senators and representatives had emerged from a backroom deal that surprised the entire body by making the bill far more draconian, bucking agreements the House Republicans had made with Democrats. Since then, Republicans have begun publicly sniping at each other, tossing accusations around about exactly who had introduced each change. Republicans quickly abandoned restrictions to Sunday voting and a provision making it easier for officials to overturn the results of elections, both of which had been introduced at the last minute, blaming each other for the ideas.

The bills have otherwise retained most of their heft: They still restrict mail-in voting and prohibit the creative solutions to the pandemic that large counties, most notably Harris County, introduced ahead of November, such as drive-through voting and 24-hour polling places. But the bills look a lot closer to the version introduced before Republicans tinkered with it in secret a little over a month ago.

It’s an interesting sign of what’s to come. Republicans have waffled because they don’t actually want the Democrats to walk out. They know that if Democrats do, the legislature won’t get anything done at all in the special session. And better to achieve something than nothing. With this little budge, they may well keep Democrats on the floor and pass a voting bill after all.

Back Then

Texas politicians have been whipping themselves into a frenzy over fake fraud, typically perpetrated by fictitious minority criminals, for more than a century. In the 1850s, white politicians widely believed that Mexicans living in the new Republic of Texas would take power back through the ballot box, which they’d failed to do in battle.

Thomas Jefferson Rusk, a respected Democratic politician and early Texas leader, said “Hordes” of native Mexicans would “come moving in...and vanquish you at the ballot box though you are invincible in arms.” The restrictions that followed in Texas — poll taxes, literacy tests, etc. — were even more about

disenfranchising Mexican-Americans than Black Americans. After all, there were significantly more of them. Charles Francis Adams Jr., a prominent member of the Adams family and a historian, in 1869 described Mexicans living in Texas as a “political menace” and “foreigners who claim American citizenship but are as ignorant of things American as the mule.” He decried that they had the same electoral power as “the mature, the useful, the industrious, the intelligent.”

In Other Voting News

In a bizarre development to the most bizarre election story since the close of 2020, the Arizona Senate president has announced that Senate Republicans will do a third count of Maricopa County’s ballots after Cyber Ninjas wraps its farce. They have purchased two counting machines, and will be doing total counts of the ballots to ensure that they match the total counts done by the county. If they don’t? They’ll count them again. And then over and over and over again until we are all dead, I guess.
The Democratic National Committee has announced it will dedicate $25 million nationwide to combat voter suppression and promote voter registration efforts — a seemingly gigantic sum designed to demonstrate to the public their seriousness. Except it’s really not that much money. Party efforts in battleground states during 2020 cost far more. The DNC spent between $7 million to $10 million each to support the Democratic parties in states like Georgia, North Carolina, and Michigan.
Several native tribes in South Dakota are suing the state, accusing it of routinely violating federal voter registration laws. The Oglala and Rosebud Nations are the most recent plaintiffs. The suit alleges that members of these nations have faced impossible barriers when attempting to register at the DMV and social services offices, and that registrations filled out in these locations are routinely not processed.
California officials are rushing to prepare for the recall election called for Democratic Gov. Gavin Newsom. Normally they’d have 190 days. This year? Just 75. Election administrators told the legislature that Sept. 14 was the earliest date they could pull this off, and that’s the day they were given.
Michigan Attorney General Dana Nessel, a Democrat, is moving forward on a suggestion from Republicans in the legislature to investigate those responsible for spreading lies about fraud after the 2020 election. Earlier this summer, the Republican-led legislature put out a report faulting individuals with personal stakes in the outcome for spreading misinformation and threatening prosecution.
The Board of Elections in New York City has asked for an investigation into allegations that a City Council candidate in Staten Island illegally harvested ballots and registered dead people to vote for him. The candidate, Marko Kepi, is a Republican and former aide to a state legislator.

In His Downtime

Now, for some fun. Our hobbyist this week is the winner of our first Ballot Battle, a game show where election whizzes competed to see who was the whizziest. The victor was Dave O’Brien, policy counsel at RepresentUs. His hobby? Not surprisingly: Trivia.

Dave O’Brien, right, with his D.C. quiz team the Fandy Pantinkins

“It’s hard to say when I started,” he said. “Being an obnoxious know-it-all probably goes back to a very early age.” And, frankly, if you are going to compete in an election quiz bowl, doesn’t being an obnoxious know-it-all go with the territory? It does for me, anyway. “My clearest memory is from college when a friend asked me to join his team for an annual trivia competition hosted by the history department. I think we ended up winning iPod shuffles.”

These days he typically competes with his trivia team, the “Fandy Patinkins,” (“perhaps one of the foremost Mandy Patinkin-themed bar trivia teams in Northwest Washington, D.C.”). The team’s favorite night was in early 2020 — before, you know, everything went to hell. “We ended up staying out much later than intended so we could finish out a prepaid bar tab, which was the prize for first place. We made friends with a birthday party that was also there and closed the place down,” he said. “The lockdown started shortly after that and it turned out to be the last time we went out and saw each other in person for a while. It crystallized in my memory as ‘the last normal night.’ In hindsight, it was a lot like the opening scene of a disaster movie where people are going about life as usual, oblivious of what’s to come.”

Why Texas Democrats had to walk out—and what they could do next

2021-06-04T21:46:00+00:00

Faced with a Republican majority intent on passing some of the most restrictive laws in the country, Texas Democrats did what they could over the spring legislative session to soften Senate Bill 7—until they had to pull the plug altogether.

“There comes a point where you just can’t take it anymore,” Rep. John Bucy, an Austin area-Democrat who serves on the House Elections Committee, told Votebeat.

After Republicans threw out all of the previously agreed upon concessions in a closed-door session at the very end of the term last weekend and refused to allow questions about provisions they’d added, they set out to pass a bill that was even more severe than originally proposed. So, hours before the close of the session, Democrats quietly trickled out of the house, leaving their desks one by one until almost 60 were empty. The Republicans, realizing they’d been played, were forced to end the session, lacking a quorum.

It has been easy for national media to portray the walkout as a dramatic act of clear-eyed organization in the face of doom, but it was a last resort and performed out of necessity. Activists and even elected officials in the state have long criticized the Texas Democratic Party for its lack of organization, which they say has cemented the party’s position in Texas as a weak, passive body that can move the needle only by leaving the floor.

The country has seen a slew of Republican-championed bills that would make voting harder in some form. Texas’ is, arguably, the most severe. Targeting large, urban counties with intense regulation and scrutiny, the bill would close polling locations that were opened to meet the needs of the pandemic, increase penalties — including criminal penalties — for election workers and voters who make errors, further restrict already-thin allowances for vote by mail in the state, and empower partisan poll watchers to be even more in-your-face. Voting in Texas was already a hassle, because voters have so few convenient options for casting a ballot and penalties are intimidatingly high for even basic mistakes made when voting. This bill would make voting harder and more intimidating.

The House and Senate both passed versions of the bill last month, with the House making far more compromises to accommodate the demands of Democrats. “The Senate version of the bill was so much worse than the House bill, and Democrats were actively contributing to the House bill in good faith,” said Bucy. But then, it all got thrown out the window.

The bill went into conference committee to sort out the changes. Although in other legislative bodies, including the U.S. Congress, legislators are generally unable to introduce brand new provisions at this stage, that’s not so in Texas. Republicans shut Democrats out of the conference entirely, and tossed most of the ameliorations they’d agreed to. Plus, they added 20 pages to the bill and refused to take questions from Democrats about their contents on the floor. Left with no ability to change the legislation or to stop it — Republicans already had the votes they needed to pass it — Democrats chose to walk out.

Southern Methodist University political science professor Cal Jillson agrees that Democrats had no other options. There were no legislative moves left to make, he said in an interview with Votebeat, and Republicans broke established precedent and perhaps the law by carrying their plan out in secret. “I do think rules were at least bent and the Democrats’ only remaining action was to break quorum,” he said.

The walkout set hair on fire across the country. Republicans demanded they be punished, and Republican Gov. Greg Abbott threatened to withhold their pay. Democrats outside the state demanded to know why such dramatic action hadn’t been taken sooner in order to spotlight the full horrors of the bill.

Democratic state Rep. Rafael Anchía of Dallas, who has been among the most ardent opponents of SB7, told Votebeat that critics have panned the party for not taking drastic measures, such as walking out of session, earlier in the year. But voting rights were not the only thing the legislature needed to address: Texas’s winter storms knocked out power for millions, for example, an urgent priority that Texans demanded redress for. “How do you execute that plan and leave for that long and then leave all of this other work that needed to get done undone?”

Democrats, he said, needed to actively participate in the entire session in order to move things like weatherization in front of SB7, so that SB7 could be delayed as long as possible while other crucial issues were addressed. “Imagine if the narrative today was that Democrats walked out and killed the bills dealing with the [power] grid and making sure that 4.5 million Texans aren’t left out in the cold and even more Texans don’t have clean water to drink?” he said. Voting might be the sexiest topic of the year, but “maybe fewer people freeze to death this winter.”

“You don’t deploy the full arsenal at once, because that just results in mutually assured destruction,” he said. Part of being in the minority, he said, is to do everything you can to advance your priorities before resorting to nuclear options. “Oftentimes that’s just not satisfying to the people who prefer to breathe fire.”

But more fire-breathing might be in the party’s future when Abbott convenes a special session so Republicans can have a second chance at passing legislation they have told voters is necessary to protect the integrity of elections. Bucy and other representatives I spoke to said Democrats are open to “staying away for as long as it takes.” In theory, Democrats could ask 51 of their members to head out of the state and simply refuse to participate, forcing the session to grind to a halt.

It’s a dramatic move, one that Texas Democrats have not taken in almost 20 years, largely because it subjects the offending legislators to arrest and jail time. In Texas, the Department of Public Safety can locate and detain members of the state legislature who refuse to return to the floor. In 2003, Democrats fled first to Oklahoma and then to New Mexico to evade the grasp of DPS in protest of redistricting maps they felt, and courts later ruled, were racist. Fifty one Democrats, this time around, would have to do something similar for weeks on end.

The probability of such a dramatic move depends on how Abbott chooses to handle the special session. By law, special sessions in Texas last 30 days. He says he’ll call them one at a time, to deal with a single piece of legislation, forcing the legislature to finalize the bill and vote on it before moving on to other issues.

If Abbott were to call a special session simply to deal with Republican priorities, such as voting restrictions and anti-trans bills, there is fundamentally little reason for Democrats to participate: Republicans need a simple majority to pass these measures, which they have. The only way to prevent the bills from passing would be to deny the legislature the ability to vote on them at all. But Abbott is a smart political animal. Activists and representatives I spoke to predict that he will likely compel Democrats to participate by weaving in popular bipartisan measures that were unaddressed in the normal session, such as teacher raises, aid for winter storm victims, and bail reform. In that case, Democrats would be unlikely to stay away, which would force them to sacrifice influence on these crucial issues.

The tricky part for Democrats will be gaming this all out in an organized way.

Anchía, like other representatives in the state, said he recognizes that Democrats need a solid strategy going forward, but he said he feels ready to tackle whatever comes in the special session. That was echoed by Bucy, who added that the walkout was evidence that “Democrats will do whatever it takes to prevent laws like these from passing,” and they’ll take that same zeal into special sessions, however many Abbott calls. “Republicans know we are serious about this.”

That show of seriousness will require leadership. No Democratic representative or activist I spoke to for this piece could point to a single, vibrant leader capable of keeping everyone under the Texas Democratic Party’s gigantic umbrella dry. While Stacey Abrams has galvanized Georgia’s Democrats against voter suppression in the state, turning out thousands to vote despite restrictive measures, no figure or group has emerged in Texas, where the laws are, indisputably, worse than in Georgia.

“Where is your Stacey Abrams? In Texas, there is no such person,” said Jillson. “I don’t see an immediate future for Democratic Party in Texas absent a personality as strong and as capable as Abrams. And if you don’t have that, then all you have is nature working its will demographically, and that takes a while.”

The media seems primed to adopt Beto O’Rourke as Texas’s answer to Georgia’s nationally famous voting advocate and former gubernatorial candidate. O’Rourke hit the campaign trail to advocate against SB7 this spring, but by the time he started ringing the gong about voter suppression in the state, it was too late. He’ll start a statewide tour to talk about voting rights this summer, even though it’s not clear when Abbott intends to call the legislature into special session to reintroduce the measure. The events listed are rallies and virtual deputy registrar training, the type of training local parties and counties already offer with regularity.

Many Democratic activists privately tell me they’re resigned to seeing a lackluster O’Rourke lead the way, even as they are growing tired of his schtick. Anchía thinks the criticism of O’Rourke is unfair, and that he has the power to be a unifying force in a state where Democrats sit under a massive tent. While in other states Democratic priorities are more aligned, Texas is a hugely diverse state racially, economically, and culturally. “I think he’s very talented and charismatic, and also very brave. He does it for me, I have to be candid,” Anchía said. “And yeah, you have to be a little glitzy and look like a Kennedy, which he does.”

Anchía said he was impressed with the organization O’Rourke is developing around voting, called Powered by People. While it would have been better if the organization had come earlier in the session in order to influence the trajectory of the bill, Anchía said they were hampered by the pandemic. “We just flipped the switch from being in an all-masked-up-no crowds frame,” he said. “I think they came late justifiably.”

Although Abrams clearly had far more success in Georgia, Anchía said Georgia was simply farther along the path that Democrats are walking in Texas now. “The gestalt of Georgia is farther right than we are, and Georgia required a couple of cycles” before national attention and money flowed to fuel the high turnout credited to progressive activists in the state. Anchía thinks Texas is next.

But Texas has been “next” for Democrats for a long time, and seems to be ignored until the very last minute quite often. President Joe Biden, for example, did speak out against SB7, calling it “wrong and un-American,” waiting until literally the very last day possible to make that emotional appeal. No one was moved. Biden, though some want him to be, is unlikely to be a convincing face for change in Texas.

Republicans in Texas, on the other hand, have multiple nationally recognized firebrands that can whip the party into a frenzy, said Jillson. The Republican Party’s success here does not come from its own carefully organized game plan, according to Jillson, but because the Republicans have power players like Gov. Greg Abbott, who is currently sitting on a $40 million bank account.

“He can fund the entire down-ballot campaign himself,” said Jillson. “It isn’t the party.”

And the Democratic party used to have nationally known heavyweights, too, but the days of a fiery, imposing LBJ and a brash but charming Ann Richards have long since passed.

Texas Democrats have never been very organized, even they’ll admit, but much of this is structural to the odd duck that is Texas legislative procedure. The legislature meets only once every two years, and only for about five months. It would be hard to play baseball on a team that practiced once every other month, and legislating is a bit more complicated than pitching and hitting. And given that Texas House members serve two year terms, team members may change from practice to practice, leaving no one with much interest in long-term planning.

That lack of organization is not endemic to the Democratic Party — it is simply a function of power.

Until about the 1970s, Texas was a reliably blue state — so blue that Texas Democrats really didn’t have to try to win votes, they simply did, Jillson told me. Much like the Republicans of today, it was simply never necessary for the party to get organized behind a unified plan, because almost everyone voted blue in legislative races regardless. Party heavyweights were enough to rally the base behind appropriate causes, fundraise, and turn out the vote.

But, after an awkward and bumbling party shift from the ’70s to the ’90s, the state has now become one-party Republican. And the Democrats have simply never gained their footing, nor have they coalesced behind a singular strategy for doing so, despite a glimmer of hope in 2018, when Texas Democrats elected a wave of new representatives. It led them to set their hopes high for 2020, only to come up far short of expectations, leading the Texas Democratic Party to mount a “deep dive” into what went wrong, and boot its executive director. Gilberto Hinojosa, who has long frustrated activists and representatives, remained in his position as chair.

The uncertain future and lack of any one entity calling the shots makes Democratic activists nervous, they say, and unsure of where to focus their efforts. They say that the state party’s failure to unite the base is unforgivable, especially when it comes to something as important as strategy on voting rights.

For his part, Anchía says the only way to prevent the bill from becoming reality is to pass the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act, which would restore pre-clearance in Texas and force changes to be approved by the Department of Justice. “We have to get preclearance back,” he said. “Congress needs to pass the damn bill.”

A look into the kitchen where restrictive voting laws are cooked up

2021-05-30T00:01:00+00:00

A version of this post was originally distributed in Votebeat’s weekly newsletter.

A couple of weeks ago, Mother Jones published video of the head of Heritage Action for America (a sister organization of the Heritage Foundation) bragging about how easy it was to “quietly” and “quickly” craft the voting legislation in Georgia, Iowa, Texas, Wisconsin, and other states.

“In some cases, we actually draft [the legislation] for them,” Executive Director Jessica Anderson said, “or we have a sentinel on our behalf give them the model legislation so it has that grassroots, from-the-bottom-up type of vibe.”

The footage has continued to reverberate. Heritage Action now faces a possible ethics probe in Iowa, and activists in Texas have filed a complaint about the group with the state ethics commission. In the leaked video, Anderson said that “19 provisions” of the Texas voting bill were “written by the Heritage Foundation’s experts.” The complaint, filed by Progress Texas, alleges the group helped draft legislation even though it had not filed as a lobbyist during the 2021 legislative session.

“Texans deserve to know who is behind these voter suppression bills,” said Ed Espinoza, executive director at Progress Texas. “The leaked video of The Heritage Foundation’s event further proves that anti-voter bills are part of a coordinated, national voter suppression effort.”

As the New York Times reported in March, Heritage Action has been claiming credit for a number of bills that progressive activists say will suppress voting. Many of these bills will make voting harder. For example, a recent analysis by the Texas Tribune shows that the current voting bill in Texas would disproportionately impact urban voters of color in the state through polling place closures.

The Heritage Foundation has spent decades tilting at the voter fraud windmill, proving nothing and often embarrassing itself when questioned in court. It is certainly not new for advocacy groups to consult on and even draft legislation, but the opacity with which this organization has operated — and the fact that leaked video was necessary for lawmakers to understand the organization’s involvement — makes for a troubling look into the kitchen where these laws were cooked up.

Now for some history. The Heritage Foundation has beer to thank for its origins. Joseph Coors — yes, that Coors — was a founding member of the group and provided much of its initial funding in the 1970s. His goal was to create a D.C. think tank for conservatives that had just as much power and influence as the Brookings Institution. ‘’Without Joe Coors, the Heritage Foundation wouldn’t exist,’’ its president, Edwin Feulner, said in a New York times obituary for Coors, ‘’and the conservative movement it nurtures would be immeasurably poorer.’’ While the American Enterprise Institute had existed for some time, Coors and his co-founders felt the organization was too academic and its ideas lacked popular support, according to historical accounts of the organization’s rise. They envisioned a think tank that wouldn’t be afraid to get involved in legislative debates and would fight hard for its causes. They appear to have achieved that goal.

Back to present day:

Here we go again! A judge in Georgia will allow 145,000 absentee ballots cast in Fulton County to be reviewed by a third party, in the vein of the Arizona audit. This judge, though, will allow only images of the ballots to be reviewed and will not require the county to hand over physical ballots to inspectors hired by Garland Favorito, a self-styled voting-integrity advocate. His background was summed up by Stephen Fowler at Georgia Public Broadcasting: “Favorito has also questioned the authenticity of events surrounding 9/11, pushed conspiracy theories about former President Bill Clinton and the assassination of John F. Kennedy and is now serving as the latest vessel for false claims of fraud with the 2020 election.”
Also following in Arizona’s footsteps, a legislator in Wisconsin is now using taxpayer money to pay three retired cops to look into allegations of fraud during the 2020 election. As in every state, there is no evidence or even meaningful suggestion of widespread fraud. The investigation will last for three months and will not come to a conclusion that would change the overall results of the election.
An attorney associated with Trump’s election conspiracies has also offered a free investigation to a county in northern Michigan into false allegations of fraudulent activity. The process and people the attorney offered were integral to a similar investigation in Michigan’s Antrim County, which ended in disaster, and an associated lawsuit was thrown out by a judge in May. The state had already conducted an audit, and the judge saw no reason to do two of them, so it’s unclear why this attorney thinks another attempt would be fruitful. The county in question, Cheboygan County, appears not to be interested in the offer anyway.
Also in Michigan, Republicans unveiled legislation that would require additional forms of ID to be submitted when voting by mail. The original bill would have required voters to submit a photocopy of an ID with their absentee ballot application, removing a longtime provision that allowed them to submit an affidavit attesting to their eligibility instead. Clerks from both parties criticized the proposal due to identity theft fears and the lack of access to copiers by the elderly and the poor. An amendment to the bill allows voters to prove identity by jotting down their state ID number or last four digits of their Social Security number. Meghan Reckling, chief of staff for Sen. Lana Theis, who sponsors the bill, said it would fix a “glaring loophole” in the state’s security. Critics call the measure “pointless.”
Liz Cheney might have become a hero for progressives when she wouldn’t back down in blaming Trump for the Jan. 6 insurrection, but her new fans shouldn’t get too far ahead of themselves. She says measures to “secure” elections are necessary, supports the laws many states are passing that would restrict voting access, and says she will never understand why people are against voter ID. In her interview with Axios on HBO, she wouldn’t say specifically why these laws are necessary but did say, “I think what we can all agree on is that what is happening right now is really dangerous.”
NorthJersey.com is out with an enlightening piece comparing New Jersey’s voting laws to those of Georgia. Hint: Voting laws aren’t just bad in the South, y’all.
The Atlanta Journal Constitution has published an interesting historical analysis of claims made by both conservatives and progressives that whatever is happening right now is “Jim Crow 2.0.”
Luzerne County, Pennsylvania, will begin an investigation into the state’s electronic system used during last week’s primary. Electronic ballots for Republican races in the county were mislabeled as “Democrat” on Dominion voting machines, which Dominion has said was because of human error. The county is unsatisfied with Dominion’s responses, so the county council has asked the local district attorney to dive in.
Investigators in the town of Windham, New Hampshire, have concluded an investigation into small discrepancies caused by the folding of ballots and have determined there was no voter fraud. The town, home to around 15,000 residents, drew national attention from the Trump campaign, which had used it as an example of fraudulent counting.
A shocking (well, not really shocking so much as horrifying) report from the Anchorage, Alaska, city clerk’s office details “unprecedented harassment of election officials” and the “dissemination of disinformation to sow distrust among voters.” Workers were photographed, harassed in person and online, and subjected to threats.
A Republican legislator in Arizona wants to criminally investigate those whose ballot signatures do not match the signature on file for the voter. Arizona already has a “curing” process by which mismatched signatures are investigated, and most are a result of aging, a physical disability or a quick signature made without thinking. Ballots that are legitimately fraudulent are already referred to local district attorneys.

This week, we break from our usual profiles of hobbyists to feature … FASHION.

Folks, it might not be infrastructure week but it is absolutely #ElectionWear week! In celebration of voting-themed shoes, arm bands, bedazzled hats, T-shirts (featuring love for “long romantic walks to the polls”), earrings, socks, 3-D printed masks, a Captain America costume, and so much more. Shout out to the St. Louis County election board for really stepping up their game with this fantastic video of the entire staff decked out at what, I imagine, was the most fun day in the office ever.

Brianna Lennon

“I Voted” Fashion Week was organized by Brianna Lennon — the county clerk in Boone County, Missouri, and co-host of the podcast High Turnout, Wide Margins — who, with help from other election enthusiasts, themed each day.

“It really started as almost an inside joke—that so many of us have closets and offices full of voting gear because we’re really that nerdy. The more I thought about it, the more I thought it would be a creative way to show how ingrained our love of elections really is and provide a fun outlet after a stressful 2020,” she said. “The elections space is such a strong community that it was really nice to share in that positivity.”

How Democrats can revive their doomed voting rights legislation

2021-05-14T22:17:00+00:00

This article was co-published with The Daily Beast.

On Tuesday, the For the People Act, democracy-reform legislation Democrats believe would expand voting access, saw a preview of its fate. The 900-page bill, dealing with everything from election administration to congressional ethics, was the subject of a full day of debate in a Senate committee with nearly 100 proposed amendments.

A total of 10 passed, while the rest went down in flames on largely party-line votes. Its future on the Senate floor looks no better: It will be forced for consideration, debated for hours, and will still fail.

Rather than squabbling over next steps or surrendering, however, the Democrats have a more realistic option that would solve election administrators’ need for funding and would boost the health of elections in a way that is truly for the people.

How? By putting election funding into their infrastructure package.

The need for this alternative strategy is obvious. S1, the Senate’s version of HR1, faces a bleak path: Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) can now force the bill to the floor as part of his power-sharing agreement with Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY). Once there, they will have an easier time amending the bill in ways that failed in committee, because Vice President Kamala Harris can break ties. But, there’s no guarantee Harris will be able to serve that role.

There aren’t 50 Democrats on board with this bill, and Joe Manchin (D-WV)—the most powerful man in the Senate—is, I’m told by staffers, carrying water for a small handful of other Democrats who do not want this bill to pass but are keeping quiet for fear of being punished by leadership. While the Democratic Party is attempting to sell this bill as supported by a unified front, it is very clearly not. And even if it were, they will still need 10 Republicans or filibuster reform, both of which appear unlikely.

Given Manchin’s reservations, expressed in a meeting on Thursday and reported by ABC News, this bill may not make it to the floor at all. (Manchin is far more likely to support a souped-up version of the John Lewis Bill, which does not give meaningful funding to election administrators.)

The For the People Act may be dead on arrival, but election funding does not have to be. While Republicans assail the infrastructure package, niggling with what “infrastructure” really means anyway, no one could feasibly argue that elections are not infrastructure—federal policy designates it, along with power and water, as “critical infrastructure.”

This idea was initially pitched by the Center for Tech and Civic Life, which in 2020 carried out the largest private grant program to election officials in U.S. history.

Unlike the For the People Act, this plan was written in direct coordination with hundreds of bipartisan election officials, who have, for years, been begging for consistent federal funding. Routing funds through the infrastructure plan provides Congress a real ability to equip local officials to give voters the elections they deserve.

“We’ve heard that robust, consistent funding is the most critical need election departments have today, and the lack of adequate, predictable funding is perhaps the greatest barrier election officials face in doing their best work,” they wrote in a statement announcing the initiative.

This is because Congress has funded elections as a secondary thought for years, infusing millions of dollars in reaction to crises: after the hanging chad debacle in 2000, after the cybersecurity failures of 2016, and during the pandemic of 2020. There has never been an effort to consistently fund elections offices such that they can plan ahead for necessary improvements.

A predictable disbursement of cash to local officials—even with clear parameters for policy priorities—would allow states like Louisiana, which needs machines right now, to buy them. But it would also allow states like Georgia, which just invested millions in new machines, to bank money against the time when they will need to upgrade their machines in eight to 10 years.

Democrats are serious about their desire for automatic voter registration, updating machines, and upgrading physical and digital security. All of these things can be provided for in the infrastructure bill, by offering specific funding for specific plans.

This process will not allow Democrats to be as prescriptive in their policymaking, that’s true, but it will become much easier to get Republicans on board—many of whom already live in and represent states with existing automatic voter registration procedures or more stringent security protocols. The money could be specifically allocated to additional polling locations, or to incentivize states to adopt paper-backed machines and begin to do rigorous auditing—all things with at least some bipartisan consensus.

That elections were left out of the infrastructure package to begin with, for many local election officials, is a head scratcher.

“Elections are clearly infrastructure,” Tiana Epps-Johnson, who heads CTCL, told me. “In order for our elections to improve, they need the funding to plan into the future. This would allow for that.”

In contrast, the For the People Act, as evidenced by the debacle of a committee markup, will not.

Even internally, Democratic staffers on the various committees responsible for the drafting of the bill acknowledged that it began as a messaging bill while they were in the minority. It was introduced in 2019 as a priority, but because Democrats did not yet hold the majority in the Senate, it was meant to send a signal only.

It was introduced again in the House as HR 1 in 2021 to demonstrate their emphasis on voting rights. The bill was then introduced in the newly Democratic-controlled Senate, with almost none of the changes demanded by elections officials, who, as I previously reported, harbored deep reservations about how they could realistically carry out these reforms. Never fear, Democrats said, they would work out the changes in committee.

In the committee markup session, Amy Klobuchar (D-MN) introduced a manager’s amendment addressing the feasibility of the massive election policy changes in the bill. These tweaks to loosen deadlines and add waivers to the mandates were welcomed by election administrators, who saw them as the first step of a good-faith effort to make the bill workable.

“They really did listen to election officials’ concerns,” said one former local official, now active in these negotiations. “I don’t believe they wanted to pass a bill that has unintended consequences, but one that ensures all eligible voters have the same opportunities to successfully participate.”

But Klobuchar’s amendment failed, dashing their hopes again. Both Schumer and McConnell showed up to this markup session, a rare event for Senate leadership, demonstrating how important both parties believe the issue to be. But while Republicans present as a solid bulwark against the bill, Democrats are arguing among themselves as to strategy and the contents of the bill.

If Democrats cannot get a basic amendment addressing basic feasibility concerns passed through a committee they control, it seems their success on the floor isn’t as high as they might claim in public statements. It’s a strategy that’s difficult for local elections officials to digest: Democrats have strapped all of their hopes on voting rights to a single bill that their own party cannot come to a consensus on, and what little funding is made available to elections officials will go down with that ship.

Meanwhile, the John Lewis Voting Rights Act—which Manchin has signaled he supports and may well get a small amount of Republican buy-in—has been left ignored.

Including elections—an obviously critical piece of American infrastructure—in the infrastructure package gives Democrats and interested Republicans a clear opportunity to at least begin to fix the problems that plague our system, even if they cannot fix all of them at once.