“The importance of people being able to vote and not be disenfranchised is extraordinarily important,” Alan Hirsch, the Democratic chair of the state elections board, said Wednesday as the board shot down Griffin’s bid. “It’s a fundamental constitutional right. It’s what makes our democracy run.”

Democrats have a majority on this board because North Carolina law has, since 1901, empowered whomever is governor—at the moment, that’s Democrat Roy Cooper—to appoint all five members of the state elections board, with no more than three members per board allowed from either major party. The governor also appoints the chair of each of the 100 counties’ elections boards. In practice, this has meant that whichever party controls the governor’s office also enjoys majorities on these boards. Josh Stein, a Democrat, won the governor’s race to replace the retiring Cooper on Nov. 5, so the Democratic Party was set to retain this edge over the next four years.

Two hours after the state elections board voted, just before 5 p.m., GOP lawmakers did their best to erase that advantage and hand their party control in the future: The legislature passed Senate Bill 382, which strips the governor of his power to appoint people to state and county election boards. 

SB 382 transfers that power to the incoming state auditor, Republican Dave Boliek. This means that Boliek will decide who sits on election boards instead of Stein, effectively flipping the partisan majorities on the state’s 101 election boards to the GOP through 2028.

“The voters showed their will to elect Josh Stein governor because they know what the governor does and they want him to be the guy that does that,” said Graig Meyer, a Democratic state Senator who represents Chapel Hill. “To take it away and give it to their new favorite Republican elected official is just direct disdain for the voters’ will.” 

The legislature passed this bill shortly after the statewide elections held on Nov. 5, but Cooper vetoed it in late November. Republicans have supermajorities in each legislative chamber thanks to gerrymandering, and they voted, on party lines, to override the veto. The GOP rushed this reform during the lame-duck session because it is poised to lose its supermajority in the upcoming legislature.

Protesters swarmed the General Assembly as the override pended over the last two weeks, shouting from the House gallery as that chamber issued the final vote on the matter Wednesday afternoon.

SB 382 is ostensibly a Hurricane Helene relief bill, and Republican leaders often tried to sell it that way. Right before the House override vote on Wednesday, a GOP state representative, Dudley Greene, spent almost 20 minutes on the chamber floor tearfully lamenting Helene’s vast destruction—and making no case for elections changes. 

But only about a dozen pages of the bill, out of 132, directly concern hurricane relief, leading Cooper to deem it a “sham.” In some moments of candor, Republicans made clear their intent: “This action item today is going to be critical to making sure North Carolina continues to be able to do what it can to deliver victories for Republicans up and down the ticket,” House Speaker Tim Moore, a Republican, said on Wednesday in an interview with Steve Bannon, the far-right media mogul and former Donald Trump strategist. Moore is moving up to the U.S. House in January thanks to a brand new congressional gerrymander he helped engineer.

“It’s not about hurricane relief,” Karen Ziegler, lead organizer for Democracy Out Loud, who was among those protesters shouting from the gallery at lawmakers over SB 382, told Bolts. “They really badly want this MAGA wishlist that’s in the bill, which is completely gob-smacking, and which is completely about voter suppression.”

The new law is full of major changes meant to weaken the powers of incoming Democratic officials. It removes the governor’s authority to fill judicial vacancies. It bans  the attorney general—a Democrat for the next four years—from participating in any lawsuits that would unwind any action taken by the legislature. And it strips the lieutenant governor, who’ll also be a Democrat through 2028, of her role overseeing a state council on energy policy. The law also eliminates two local court seats that have been held of late by judges who have struck down GOP election laws.

This broad power grab looms particularly large over election administration. The state elections board is responsible for certifying election results, adjudicating campaign complaints (like Griffin’s) and supervising the boards of election in each of the state’s 100 counties. 

The county boards also have broad authority, determining, for example, the number and location of early voting sites. When these county boards cannot reach an agreement on those plans, the state election board makes the final call.

Republicans in North Carolina have pushed to scale back early voting, and county boards in the state often disagree on how widely to make it available. They’ve split in some places on whether to set up voting on Sundays, which is a day used by many Black voters. In populous Union County, for instance, the board in 2022 sought six early voting sites across two Sundays over an alternative plan that would have enabled no Sunday voting at all. Other county boards had similar disagreements. 

Recent research in North Carolina has shown that early voting is the most popular method in the state, and that restricting it would disproportionately harm people of color and suppress Democratic support. County election boards also supervise voter registration and count ballots. 

In addition to shifting the partisan control of election boards, SB 382 shortens the amount of time voters have to request absentee ballots, gives counties less time to county ballots, and restricts the number of days county election systems have to reach out to voters who have cast provisional ballots and need to resolve questions about their eligibility in order to be counted. The state has allowed nine days for that operation, but the new law brings it down to three days. More than 65,000 North Carolinians—Black voters and Democrats, disproprotionately—were forced to cast provisional ballots this year, according to the Wilmington StarNews. 

Jeff Loperfido, chief counsel for voting rights at the Southern Coalition for Social Justice, warns that the new three-day deadline for ballot curing will make it harder for voters to be counted. 

“Every additional barrier you put up runs the risk of disenfranchising voters,” he told Bolts. “North Carolina has a history, with Jim Crow laws and numerous cases of intentional racial discrimination related to the ballot box. These things have a legacy and impact and it puts an onus on the voter to try to do everything right to try to navigate the process.”

Loperfido also predicted that the GOP majorities on the state and county election boards would pursue other changes that restrict people’s access to voting, for instance by cutting funding to local elections departments that need resources to resolve voter issues. 

“There’s a lot of leeway in election administration here, over what it costs to run elections, how clean you want your voter rolls to be, and having the ability to scrutinize more heavily when it’s advantageous to your preferred outcome is probably beneficial to your political party,” he said. 

Republicans in North Carolina have tried to take power over state elections for years. In 2018, lawmakers put a proposed constitutional amendment on the ballot to remove the governor’s power to appoint election board members and instead hand it to the legislature, but the measure failed overwhelmingly. In 2023, the legislature passed SB 749 to require an even number of Democrats and Republicans on each elections board—a change that was likely to produce partisan gridlock and ultimately hamper voter access.

The governor sued to block that 2023 legislation, and it remains caught up in court, never having gone into effect.

Kym Meyer, an attorney who has argued before the state supreme court on past voting rights issues, predicted that SB 382, the new law that Republicans passed this week, will also wind up in court. “It will be immediately challenged,” she told Bolts. She also predicted that the lawsuit over the 2023 law will be promptly mooted. (Editor’s note: Just hours after publication of this story, Cooper and Stein, the governor-elect, filed a lawsuit against a section of SB 382 that strips the governor’s ability to appoint the head of the Highway Patrol. Litigation against other provisions may still come in the future.)

But Meyer, who is now litigation director for the Southern Environmental Law Center and who is married to Graig Meyer, the state senator, was among a half-dozen voting rights advocates who said they aren’t optimistic about what could come next in court: Republicans have a 5-2 majority on the state supreme court, which is itself, in part, a product of GOP legislative efforts to help Republicans win elections to that court. The court has followed up by blessing GOP priorities, including by blessing gerrymanders that favor Republicans electorally and restricting rights restoration for people on probation and parole. It may also end up deciding last month’s supreme court race, as Griffin’s camp has indicated it may appeal Wednesday’s rejection from the state elections board.

Several voting rights advocates specifically called out as cynical the legislature’s decision, in SB 382, to have the state auditor make board appointments. No other state auditor in the country would have the kind of power over election administration that’s outlined in SB 382. Democrats on Nov. 5 won several statewide offices besides the governorship, including attorney general and secretary of state; the auditor’s is arguably the highest-profile office that will be held by the GOP.  

It’s no coincidence, said Bob Hall, the former longtime director of the voting rights organization Democracy North Carolina, that the legislature proposed this reform right after voters flipped the auditor’s office red for the first time in 15 years. It shows, he feels, that Republicans are willing to find an advantage wherever they can.

“They are picking an executive-branch position—any executive branch position—to try to sidestep the part of the constitution that seems to vest administrative duty over boards of elections to the executive branch,” Hall said. “It is extreme, and it’s very aggressive.” 

Boliek, the incoming auditor, said during his campaign that he wants to investigate voter rolls and reform voting equipment in the state, echoing conservatives who have cast doubt on election integrity. 

Republican state Representative Destin Hall, who is set to succeed Moore as House speaker, defended the bill as falling squarely within the legislature’s prerogatives on Wednesday, saying on the House floor, “The reality is, in this state the constitution gives this body the ability to make certain decisions, and the folks elected this body just as they did Governor-Elect Stein coming in. And that’s what we’ve done in this bill.”

It’s a reminder for voting rights advocates that Republicans will, as Speaker Moore told Steve Bannon, continue to do what they can to mold the democratic process in their favor.

Said Kym Meyer, the attorney who has argued voting rights cases in state court, “At this point they’ve come up with five or six different ways to take power. This is the latest, and if in four years there’s a new auditor and it’s a Democrat, they’ll just do something different.”

The post GOP Grabs Control of North Carolina Election Boards, Rushing to Negate November Losses appeared first on Bolts.

Voters in Maricopa County, home to Phoenix and most of Arizona’s population, elected Heap last week to be their next county recorder. He defeated Democrat Tim Stringham by about four percentage points—a relative blowout for the nation’s most populous swing county, where the last two recorder elections were decided by 0.3 points and 1.1 points, respectively.

Maricopa County has been a hotbed of conspiracy theories about voter fraud since the 2020 election, and the outgoing recorder, Republican Stephen Richer, suffered death threats for rebuffing these unfounded allegations. Heap, who defeated Richer in the GOP primary in July, has fanned those conspiracy theories and refused to recognize as legitimate the results of the 2020 and 2022 elections.

As a state representative, Heap backed legislation to ban most early-voting options in the state and to encourage hand-counting of ballots. He ran this year with the backing of a corps of prominent far-right politicians like Kari Lake, who have spent recent years sowing distrust in the state’s election results. Echoing their lie that election administration in Arizona is conducive to fraud, he vowed to pursue major changes from the recorder’s office.

“The voters are sick of our elections making us a national laughingstock,” he told the crowd at an Arizona rally for Trump in September. “The voters are sick of being mocked and condescended to when they ask sincere questions about our election system. And, most of all, voters are sick of hearing from their neighbors, ‘Why should I even vote if I can’t trust the system?’”

Heap now assumes office at the same time Trump retakes the White House, having signaled his intent to use federal law to restrict voter registration and ballot access. Heap’s promises to “clean the voter rolls” or to have all votes be counted by Election Day could test how far Trump allies can stretch this playbook in local election offices. 

But Heap will face many constraints in implementing his agenda. The recorder’s office can’t just wipe people off of voter rolls, as state law explicitly forbids that. It can’t ensure election results are known by the end of Election Day, mainly because the office doesn’t even control ballot tabulation in the county. And if Heap doubts the results of any future election, he cannot thwart certification because that, too, is outside of his office’s purview. The secretary of state’s office, in Democratic hands until at least 2026, looms as another check since it issues regulations guiding how elections must be run.

Plus, the Maricopa County Board of Supervisors, which oversees many election administration duties, moved just last month to take away some more power from the office Heap will inherit. 

The degree of pushback this board would give him remains to be seen. Two like-minded Republicans won supervisor elections on Tuesday, bringing the body closer to his politics. 

One is Debbie Lesko, a U.S. representative who voted to overturn the results of the 2020 election results on Jan. 6, 2021; she will replace a Republican who faced threats for defending the local system. The other, Mark Stewart, has also questioned past election results. He successfully challenged Republican incumbent Jack Sellers, who got flack from conservatives for certifying election results.

After losing to Stewart in the July primary, Sellers endorsed the Democratic nominee over Stewart, because, he told Phoenix radio station KJZZ, “the future of democracy is on the ballot.” But Stewart prevailed by about four percentage points last week. 

Still, election experts in Arizona told Bolts that, even as they’ll vigilantly monitor the effects of Heap’s policies on voting rights and access, they’re cautiously hopeful that sufficient backstops exist to hold him in check if he attempts drastic measures.

“I’m a little bit worried, but I try to be optimistic that things will be OK,” said Helen Purcell, who served as the recorder in Maricopa County from 1989 to 2017. “Mr. Heap has limited abilities in what he can and cannot do as far as influencing the process. So I’ll try to give him the benefit of the doubt and hope he will abide by our state laws and federal laws.”

Purcell, a Republican, is one in a string of elections officials in Maricopa County who have fought back against election deniers since 2020. Her successor in office, Democrat Adrian Fontes, is now Arizona’s secretary of state and has placed himself on the frontlines of that fight. The recorder after Fontes was Richer, who became a national figure for frequently refuting his own party’s false claims of voter fraud.

Richer this fall teamed up with the county’s GOP-run board of supervisors to restrict the powers of the recorder’s office going forward. Under the terms of an agreement they reached on Oct. 23, the supervisors will now manage the processing of early ballots, a job the county recorder previously had. The supervisors will also take control of the recorder’s IT staff and its $5 million budget.

This shift in responsibility continued a trend that has reduced the recorder’s role in elections over the last decade. When Purcell was in office, the recorder had purview over most everything to do with elections. But Republican supervisors snatched some power once Fontes, the Democrat, came into office. From that point, the recorder was left in charge of voter registration and early voting, while the supervisors handled Election Day voting, the creation of the ballots, and the tabulation of the ballots. The board will retain these roles going forward. 

As county recorder, Heap will control voter registration and the handling of early ballot requests. He’ll also control signature verification on early ballots and the process of curing early ballots that are tentatively rejected because of an error such as a mismatched or missing voter signature. 

Purcell worries that Heap could use his authority to target certain voters. “My concern is with voter registration and how he’ll instruct staff to deal with that,” she told Bolts. 

She stressed that outside organizations facilitate a lot of voter registrations. “I wonder whether he’ll take a cautious view about those groups, which could have the possibility of curtailing certain people being able to vote,” she said.

Arizona already has strict laws when it comes to how people register to vote, as it requires proof of citizenship, unlike most states. Alex Gulotta, state director of the Arizona arm of All Voting is Local, a nonprofit that advocates for voting rights, worries about residents who’ll encounter issues like an error on their registration forms, or a mismatched signature on their mail ballot. 

He warns that these voters will be adversely affected if Heap does not make a point to provide easy access to outside groups and to actively reach out to voters affected by an error. 

“I have no doubt that if someone wanted to create an office that was harsher and less caring of voters, they could do that,” Gulotta told Bolts. “People rely on the recorder’s office every day to fix little things that are broken. If it’s not accessible and they don’t fix things adequately, such that there are hours-long wait times, it can really have a negative impact.”

Throughout his campaign, Heap has failed to produce concrete evidence that Maricopa County elections are mismanaged. There has been no finding of fraud or other systemic voting issues in Maricopa County; a post-2020 audit of the county elections turned up nothing. When the local PBS station pressed Heap for evidence to back up his claims, Heap provided none and rather pointed simply to the fact that he’s heard from constituents who perceive problems.

Heap did not reply to a request for comment for this article.

A majority of Maricopa County supervisors seem unlikely to be receptive to major election overhauls. Republicans have controlled this board without interruption since the 1960s, and on Tuesday they kept that streak going; as of publication, the GOP has won three of the five seats on the board and Democrats have won one. The fifth seat is too close to call.

But while incoming supervisors Stewart and Lesko are election deniers, the third Republican supervisor, Thomas Galvin, has defended the county’s election system, and he beat an election denier in the July primary. Kate Brophy McGee, the Republican leading in the unresolved race—by just 359 votes as of Tuesday morning—also has a reputation for being relatively moderate. 

Stringham, Heap’s defeated Democratic opponent, hopes that these officials can provide a backstop that would prevent Heap from upending elections, but he cautioned that it would be difficult for Republican officials to withstand pressure from the rest of their party. 

“Thomas Galvin is absolutely not an election denier, and I don’t think that Kate Brophy McGee is either,” Stringham told Bolts. “But the problem with Republican politics is that if you don’t go along with it, you’re out, so I don’t think you can look at that board and go, ‘It’s OK; there’s three non-election deniers.” He added, “I think there are four Republicans and one Democrat, and the Republican Party math is that you’ll go along with it.” 

Still, Stringham predicted that even Heap may suffer blowback from his party’s base, as Richer did, if the GOP ends up losing Arizona’s elections in 2026 or 2028 and again falsely alleges fraud. 

“He can’t really deliver on this crap, but he can get blamed for it,” Stringham said.

Purcell and Gulotta also worry that local guardrails may not be sufficient to keep up morale among election workers. Arizona has already seen very high turnover in election administration since 2020.

“In any institution, the attitude of the leader impacts the way people behave and whether or not people want to work in the office,” Gulotta said. 

Heap will not be the only election denier to assume leadership over an elections office in Arizona. Republican Recorder David Stevens cruised to re-election in Cochise County, which has made national news for illegally seeking hand-counts of election results. Stevens partnered with his county’s supervisors in that effort. 

In Yuma County, Republican David Lara, who is an outspoken election denier, unseated a non-election denier Republican in the primary and then won overwhelmingly last week. Lara has often lied about Arizona elections and has floated punishing voter fraud with the death penalty. His purported investigation into election tampering claims helped inspire “2,000 Mules,” the debunked movie that alleges the 2020 election was stolen from Trump.

Yuma County, unlike Maricopa County, places virtually all election-related duties in the office of the recorder, meaning that Lara’s control over how his office runs elections is likely to have far fewer checks than Heap’s will.

Patty Ferguson-Bohnee, director of the Indian Legal Clinic at Arizona State University, is familiar with voter suppression in Arizona, as an advocate for the voting rights of Native people. Her legal clinic sued Apache County last week for turning away or otherwise discouraging participation by Native voters—the latest reminder, she said, of why it matters to have local elections offices that prioritize voter access. Following last week’s results, she told Bolts she looks warily toward future cycles: “People need to perform their ministerial functions they’ve been put in place to do. There should be guardrails in place to protect that, but if you start doing things that are disenfranchising your own voters, people are going to be pretty upset.”

Ferguson-Bohnee also noted that the conservative claims that Arizona elections are rigged suddenly quieted once Trump carried the state last week. 

“They’re not claiming any voter fraud because of the way the election turned out,” she said.

The post Trump Allies Gain Power Over Elections in Arizona’s Largest County appeared first on Bolts.

I answered six of your questions in the first part of our mailbag two weeks ago, from the role of state auditors to the most pivotal referendums. Today, I tackle six more. 

Navigate to the question that most interests you here, or scroll down to explore them all at your leisure:

Which legislative chambers may flip in November?
Jump to our answer.

What happens in elections where no one is running?
Jump to our answer.

Which party will win more congressional delegations, in case that matters for the presidential election?
Jump to our answer.

What happens if you walk into the wrong polling place by mistake?
Jump to our answer.

I spent hours trying to research our local candidates’ platforms and it was fruitless. Shouldn’t every candidate have a website with their platform?!
Jump to our answer.

I can’t seem to get people to care about boards of canvassers. Can you explain the significance of the offices that play a role in elections?
Jump to our answer.

The election is now just days away—so explore our cheat sheet of more than 500 critical races, and our election guides to supreme court races and to local criminal justice races. Before you know it, we’ll have plenty more on the results in November.

What is the [state legislative] chamber with the best chance of switching to blue? (Arizona I assume, but is there another?) — @sidewalkslam, on BlueSky

You’re right that Democrats’ biggest target is Arizona: If they pick up two seats each in the Senate and House, they would secure full control of the state government—a first since 1966.

But that’s not all. 

There’s Wisconsin, most notably. The victory of a liberal justice in 2023 paved the way for a ruling that struck down GOP gerrymanders. Now, the legislative elections are taking place under radically different maps that give Democrats a chance to flip the chambers; that’s especially true in the Assembly, since only half of the state Senate is up this year.

The New Hampshire House ended in a near-draw two years ago; if Democrats flip it this year, they would end GOP control over the state no matter what happens in the governor’s race. This chamber often comes down to tiny margins: It has 400 seats—that’s a national high, by far—and 30 races went to a recount two years ago; six were decided by a margin under 10 votes. 

But the GOP is also looking for gains. In 2022, Democrats unexpectedly flipped four chambers, which sparked major policy swings. This fall, control of three of them hangs by a thread. In Pennsylvania’s House, Michigan’s House, and Minnesota’s Senate, losing a single seat would cost Democrats the majority. (Democrats’ fourth 2022 gain, Michigan’s Senate, is not on the ballot this fall.)  The GOP is also eying other chambers, most notably Alaska’s House and Minnesota’s House.

And don’t just look at which party wins more seats. Many states are on supermajority watch. Nevada Democrats might gain a two-thirds majority in the state Senate, to go along with the one they already have in the Assembly; this would allow them to override vetoes by the Republican governor. The GOP, meanwhile, hopes to keep new supermajorities in Nebraska and North Carolina: The defection of a single Democrat in each state handed Republicans that edge, and now they can’t afford to lose any seat.

North Carolina Democrats, in fact, want to avenge that defection directly: Tricia Cotham, the lawmaker who switched parties, paving the way for major conservative wins like new abortion restrictions, is running for reelection in the Charlotte suburbs. The GOP redrew legislative maps to help her, but this is one of the most expensive races of the year.

Hoping to go even more granular and learn about which specific districts will determine the majority in these chambers? Our Bolts cheat sheet provides you information, state by state.

What happens in elections where no one is running? In my county in South Carolina, we have no one running for Soil and Water District Commission, but there is an ability to write-in a candidate. — Noah, from South Carolina

It’s extremely common for elections to feature one candidate running unopposed. Prosecutor races are often elections in name only, with incumbents waltzing into office with no opponent. This fall, all five of Oregon’s supreme court races feature a sitting justice with no challenger. Democrats are already sure to run the Massachusetts legislature next year, and Republicans the Oklahoma legislature, because most seats in each state have been left uncontested. 

But what about elections where no one files at all? That’s far less common, but it’s by no means unheard of. They’re more likely to pop up for local offices that are under the radar, like municipal treasurers, school board members, or neighborhood councils. 

Elections for soil and water commissions, which are local bodies that are meant to protect natural resources, are a prime spot for this. You just asked about one South Carolina county, but there are actually a handful in your state where no one filed to run for these bodies. It’s a similar story in North Carolina and Oregon, two other states with soil and water districts. 

If no one files to run by the deadline for candidates to appear on the ballot, it’s still possible for someone to mount a write-in bid. But that’s not as simple as just getting a few friends to jot down your name. Many states require that someone come forward and formally register as a write-in contender, though what that means varies greatly. In South Carolina, where you live, there’s no form to file, though the state asks candidates to notify local authorities. In Wisconsin, you need to file a form at least a few days prior. In North Carolina, depending on the office, you may need to collect signatures and file a petition months before an election. 

For instance, in Dare County, North Carolina, no one filed to appear on the ballot for the soil and water commission job, but a resident is currently mounting a write-in campaign.

What if an election really has no winner? Say no one ran, and no write-in materialized. The next step, once again, depends on your local laws. In many cases, this gets treated like a regular vacancy that the governor, county board, or city council would fill via an appointment. Here, too, some states have idiosyncratic rules: If such a situation occurs in North Carolina, the incumbent office-holder may hold the seat for the entire term even if they didn’t run for reelection.

Is there a chance for Democrats to win more congressional *delegations* this cycle? I’m thinking about the situation where neither candidate gets 270 electoral votes. Can Democrats get the lead in 26 states? — @MeWritesGood on X

This question refers to a possible scenario in which neither Harris nor Trump reach a majority in the electoral college—whether because they tied at 269 each, or even because of a faithless elector. In such a case, the U.S. House would decide the election: Each state’s delegation gets one combined vote, and someone needs the support of 26 delegations to become president. The presidential election hasn’t been decided in this way since 1824.

The GOP currently controls 26 delegations and Democrats 22. Two are tied. But what matters is the next Congress, the one that’ll be elected on Nov. 5. So could things change?

To your question: It’s exceedingly difficult to come up with a plausible set of November results that get Democrats to 26. Even if they were to sweep all districts on Bolts’ cheat sheet of competitive U.S. House races, they would only get to 23 delegations. 

Democrats face many obstacles here. For one, the more sparsely populated states lean red, the same structural issue that skews the U.S. Senate to the GOP. Just like in the Senate, the blue bastion of D.C. has no congressional representation. Plus, while North Carolina’s delegation is currently tied, the GOP redrew the state map with an aggressive gerrymander that guarantees it will gain a clear edge. 

A more worthwhile question is: Could the GOP slip below 26? This would happen if delegations end up tied, effectively canceling out their votes entirely and preventing the House from choosing any winner. (In such a scenario, the Vice President-Elect, chosen by the U.S. Senate, becomes the acting president.) 

Even for this goal, Democrats need a lot to go right for them. Accounting for the GOP’s likely gain of North Carolina, they need to defend their vulnerable seats in Alaska, Michigan, Minnesota, Pennsylvania, and Virginia, and gain enough seats to erase the GOP’s majorities in two of these four state delegations: Arizona, Iowa, Montana, and Wisconsin. 

The basic issue here: You’d expect House Democrats to only pull off such a sweep if the election cycle is very favorable to them—if their base turns out much more, for instance, or if undecided voters swing their way. But if the presidential race is so tight that it’s been thrown to the House, that’s probably not what election night looks like down ballot.

What happens if you walk into the wrong polling place by mistake? — @sommersmurf on BlueSky

If you realize that you’re in the wrong polling place, poll workers may be able to identify where you should go, and you may still have time to head to the correct location. But things may not be so simple. Maybe poll workers say they don’t know where you’re supposed to vote, or you believe your name was removed from voter rolls incorrectly, or there’s just no more time. Some states are also prone to cut polling places at the last minute, creating confusion. 

At that point, you can ask to cast a provisional ballot. (This option exists in every state other than Idaho and Minnesota, both of which offer same-day registration, which mitigates this issue.) A provisional ballot is one that’s put aside pending verification of a voter’s eligibility. 

But what happens next varies greatly by state: If local officials end up confirming that you did cast a provisional ballot in the wrong polling place, there’s a big range in what they’ll do with it. 

Broadly speaking, they fall in two big categories. They could count your vote for all the races you were eligible for: If you went a neighborhood over, you may have cast a vote in the wrong city council race, but why should your vote for governor or president also be tossed? 

But some states don’t even allow such a partial count. They completely reject a provisional if a voter casts it in the wrong place. Nothing is salvaged. This approach of fully rejecting provisionals “makes no sense,” says Jon Sherman, an attorney with the Fair Election Center who has written on the issue. “It’s totally irrational to reject people’s federal and statewide choices when they would be eligible to vote in those races anywhere in the state.”

You can find a comprehensive breakdown on which side each state falls in on Ballotpedia.

To reduce these risks, many states have set up at-large voting centers: These are polling places that can accommodate people living anywhere in a county or a city. Chicago calls them “supersites.” Such centers are common during the early voting period; some places also set them up on Election Day. 

“(At-large) voting centers are a major boost for turnout, particularly for low-propensity voters,” says Sherman, pointing to the research into their effects. “They are more convenient locations, and bigger and more accessible.”

But like so much else about how we vote, these rules are caught up in restrictions and litigation that sometimes produce a strange mismash. 

Take Arizona. On Election Day, this state uses at-large county centers, and simultaneously it uses precincts, much smaller locations that each voter is assigned to. On Nov. 5, there will be 246 at-large locations dispersed across the sprawling Maricopa County where people can vote regardless of where they live in the county. But if they go to a precinct location, and get it wrong, the state shows no mercy: Republicans passed a law that requires officials to toss provisionals cast in the incorrect location in their entirety—no partial count. Democrats sued but lost in a landmark Supreme Court case in 2021. This year, the GOP tried to ban the at-large centers as well, blaming them with no evidence for voter fraud, but they fell short.

I live in a pretty rural town in Virginia. I spent almost 2 hours the other day trying to research our local candidates’ platforms and it was basically fruitless. By the end I was poring through their LinkedIn profiles and the Facebook accounts of their various relatives trying to learn ANYTHING. Shouldn’t every candidate have to have a website with their platform?! — @usetyourloafman on Threads

I’ve shared your experience as a voter—and also as a journalist covering races that touch the criminal legal system, like prosecutors and sheriffs. Many candidates running for these offices avoid sharing their policies. They also sometimes insist they shouldn’t have to answer policy questions because they’re just running to apply the law, a response that ignores the vast discretion they’ll inherit.

In a past election cycle, I reached out to dozens of candidates running for sheriff in Texas about whether they planned to assist ICE with immigration enforcement as part of the agency’s 278(g) program, which is a key policy question that sheriffs control. Few responded. One replied with, “I do not think it is appropriate for me to speak about specific program recommendations for the sheriff’s office until I am sheriff.” (This candidate lost, by the way.)

Journalists here play an important role in asking candidates about their views, and many newsrooms have created extensive guides to help people navigate their local ballots. 

Nonpartisan groups like the League of Women Voters also publish candidate questionnaires and organize forums—though candidates will often decline to participate. And advocacy organizations may also want to pin them down about their commitment.

Leslie Cushman, an advocate with the Washington Coalition for Police Accountability, a group that’s talking to candidates in a local sheriff’s race, talked to me recently about why it’s important to her to press local candidates for answers. “We’ll ask them to get their policies in writing,” she said. “That’s the only way you can hold a candidate accountable, is if they violated a policy. If you don’t have a policy, then there’s nothing to measure anything against.”

In my state, Michigan, commissioners choose boards of canvassers. When we almost refused to certify our 2020 elections, people were furious and asked, how did these canvassers get their jobs? Now, I can’t seem to get people to care. Can you explain the significance of this and other downballot offices that can have major effects on elections? Roles that may not be obvious for their importance but are very much so? — Stacey, from Michigan

“Sometimes the vote counter is more important than the candidate,” Trump told Pennsylvania Republicans two years ago. His efforts to subvert the 2020 presidential election, from telling the Georgia secretary of state to “find” him thousands of votes, to his team’s hope that local officials would delay certification to create what they called a “cloud of confusion,” relied on the complicity of people sitting on local and state boards.

This is why Bolts created a resource, “Who Counts Our Elections,” that details who processes, counts, and certifies results in each state, and how they come to be in office. Here readers can learn, in their state, what offices play what role in this process.

In Michigan counties, for instance, local commissioners appoint the members of the canvassing board. In Pennsylvania, elected commissioners double as a board of elections. In Florida, three local officials come together to act as a certifying board. There are also separate statewide offices to finalize the results in each. To make matters more complicated, the officials who handle elections in the runup to election night may be different than those who handle the count; we have compiled state-by-state information on who runs elections in a separate resource.

And many of these election officials are elected themselves. 

In 2022, election deniers tried to take over elections offices but largely lost. Still, some sitting officials have signaled an openness to stretching their role and helping the GOP. If they act on it, it’d be up to state officials and courts to intervene and keep the count running smoothly. 

And this fall, there are still more downballot races that may hand election systems to election deniers. This includes the statewide races in Oregon and Missouri, and local races in Arizona’s all-important Maricopa County (Phoenix) and across the state of Florida. 

The post Downballot Stakes: Your Questions Answered appeared first on Bolts.

Montana Republicans have been trying to make voting harder, but they’ve hit a wall at the state supreme court. 

This high court leans liberal in a state that has otherwise grown quite conservative, and so it’s been a regular thorn in the side of GOP politicians as they’ve tried to advance their agenda. That’s been true on voting issues, but also on guns, abortion, trans rights, and more. 

This year, two justices who have drawn Democratic support in the past—including the chief justice, who authored a decision national liberals cheered a decade ago for its defiance of the U.S. Supreme Court’s Citizens United ruling—have chosen to retire rather than seek a new term. And conservatives see this as a major opportunity to reshape the court in their favor. 

The court is ostensibly nonpartisan and the retiring justices have not always aligned, including on voting rights matters, but conservative victories in the contests to fill their two seats could boost the right’s interests in a venue that has long frustrated them. Under the shadow of Democratic U.S. Senator Jon Tester’s difficult reelection bid, these races test whether Montanans, who’ve voted in Republicans to run the legislative and executive branches, and are likely to do so again this fall, maintain any appetite for counterbalance. 

The stakes for election administration are especially high, with Montana Republicans having already aimed for a string of restrictions that, but for the court, would be in law today. 

In 2021, the first year since 2004 in which the GOP fully controlled the state government, lawmakers moved quickly to limit ballot access, passing a string of bills to end same-day voter registration; limit voting opportunities for people who turn 18 close to an Election Day; make voter ID standards stricter; and ban people from being paid to collect ballots on behalf of people who cannot file them on their own or who prefer not to. 

Voting rights advocates could expect no relief from the governor, Republican Greg Gianforte, nor from Montana’s top elections official, Republican Secretary of State Christi Jacobsen, who backed these reforms from the start. Gianforte and Jacobsen both endorsed the changes in the name of fighting voter fraud, a conservative refrain in the wake of the 2020 election.

That left only the Montana Supreme Court. “It’s our last backstop,” Keaton Sunchild, director of civic engagement at the nonprofit Western Native Voice, told Bolts recently. 

Sunchild’s organization was part of a coalition, including the state Democratic Party and various Native American groups, that sued over the 2021 voting restrictions. In March of this year, the state supreme court struck down each of the four laws that the GOP passed in 2021 in a decision that made clear the court’s investment in keeping elections accessible and in fending off attempts to curtail voters’ rights. 

“The legislature’s responsibility” to shape the state election system “must be carefully scrutinized against our most basic right to vote,” that decision stated. 

The court denounced the reforms for their potential to significantly suppress turnout and called out Jacobsen for alleging significant voter fraud but never offering proof. Jacobsen, who is running for reelection this fall, told local media she was “devastated” by the decision.

“In this particular moment, the court appears to be the only government actor that is interested in ensuring that there is robust ballot access, consistent with the constitution, and that has the ability to do something about it,” University of Montana assistant law professor Constance Van Kley told Bolts.  (Jacobsen has since appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court, arguing that a state supreme court lacks the authority to review election laws. The federal justices already rebuffed that notion, known as the independent legislature doctrine, in 2023.)

Today, justices who ran with conservative backing claim just two of the court’s seven seats, and neither of them is on the ballot this year. There’s no partisan affiliation in Montana’s judicial elections, but partisan groups often take sides in their races. 

So if the right sweeps the two seats that are up this fall, it would mean that justices with past conservative backing have secured a majority on the court.

But in practice, the lines on this court are much blurrier, and the justices have often formed peculiar alliances. For example, one of the two justices with past conservative support, Laurie McKinnon, sided with liberal justices earlier this year when she voted to strike down the GOP’s four 2021 restrictions on voting rights. 

One of two justices who dissented in the overturning of those laws is Dirk Sandefur, whom Republicans aggressively tried to unseat in his last reelection bid. Sandefur, who is retiring this year, wrote in his dissent that courts should not act as a “super-legislature” and second guess lawmakers who “merely regulate” voting, though he did side with the majority in striking down one of the four GOP laws.

Said Van Kley, of Sandefur’s dissent and of the court generally, “Judges haven’t always been exactly who people thought they’d be when they voted them in. As much as you have people out there who are trying to tell voters that you’re going to get specific things from specific candidates, I don’t think history suggests that is going to be the case.”

The court this year unanimously struck down a law requiring parental consent for people under 18 who are seeking abortions, and it voted 6-1 to allow a ballot measure enshrining abortion rights in the state constitution to proceed to the ballot this year. Also earlier this year, the court struck down new restrictions on transgender athletes—here, too, on a vote that defied expectations based on partisan support the justices had received in their campaigns. 

Liberals have also experienced losses at the court. In February, for one, justices disappointed environmental advocates when they voted 5-2 to bless a controversial mining plan, with several judges who’ve received Democratic support in the past voting in the majority.

But overall, it’s conservatives who have been more frustrated by the court’s record. Shortly after they took control of the state government in 2021, the GOP proposed changing the rules around judicial appointments and elections, and they adopted a law that eliminated the state’s independent nominating commission. 

They’ve also introduced bills to elect justices through gerrymandered districts rather than statewide, and to make future supreme court races partisan, though neither policy has passed. Statehouse Republicans are considering trying again next year. 

In 2022, they endured a high-profile setback, when a former Republican operative ran against a Democratic-appointed justice, and wound up losing despite the support of Governor Gianforte. 

This fall brings yet another opportunity for conservatives. The first of the two supreme court elections will decide who replaces retiring Chief Justice Mike McGrath, who served as the state’s Democratic attorney general from 2000 to 2008 before joining the state supreme court. McGrath wrote the majority opinion this spring striking down the 2021 voting restrictions. 

In the race to fill his seat, Cory Swanson, the county attorney in Broadwater County, faces Jerry Lynch, a former federal magistrate judge. Swanson is a self-proclaimed “judicial conservative” and he’s running with the support of conservative groups, including pro-gun advocates and business interests. Lynch, who has said he supports reproductive rights and that “we need to ensure” they’re available to “future generations,” counts among his endorsers major trade unions and environmental groups.

The second race is to replace Sandefur. His seat will be filled by one of two trial judges, Katherine Bidegaray or Dan Wilson. The contours of this race are similar to the first: liberal interests are backing Bidegaray, and Wilson has drawn support from the state’s GOP leaders. 

On the campaign trail, these four supreme court candidates have stressed their commitments to judicial independence and typically distanced themselves from the organizations and partisan actors who are backing them, the Montana Free Press reports. And they appear to be saying little on the hot-button issues that they may be asked to weigh in on. 

Still, Bidegaray and Lynch have both aligned with the liberal majority on the court when it comes to the recent debates around election administration. 

They each said in an ACLU candidate survey that they agreed with the court’s recent rulings striking down the 2021 voter restrictions. Each also said they believe the state constitution protects rights to abortion, contraception, and same-sex marriage. 

In that survey, Wilson declined to respond at all and Swanson said he could not comment on these matters because he expects he might have to rule on them.

In a separate survey conducted by the Free Press, Swanson was more open about his judicial philosophy, calling himself a “textualist,” an approach associated with conservative jurists, and citing U.S. Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts as an inspiration. 

Lynch, his opponent in the chief justice race, told the Free Press, “The stakes could not be higher in this election. Montanans of all political stripes face assaults on their constitutional rights.”

None of the candidates responded to Bolts’ questions on election law.

As conservatives look to gain ground this year, more crucial elections loom: Two liberal-aligned justices are on the ballot in 2026 and 2028. 

Voting advocates, meanwhile, hope that electing two new justices who agree with the overturning of the 2021 laws—and replacing Sandefur, who dissented, with Bidegaray—would cement a strong majority on the state supreme court to block future voting restrictions. 

Sunchild said his organization, Western Native Voice, is endorsing Lynch and Bidegaray. Sunchild says he is nervous that Republicans will bring back efforts to end same-day voter registration and harshen voter ID if they feel like they can get away with it in court. 

“It’s hard to tap into that Republican supermajority, so you kind of cross that off as a way to get things done,” Sunchild said. “It’s the supreme court we view as the last resort, and the best play. It is our last, best shot to make sure that bad policy isn’t put into law in Montana.”

The election’s stakes are also not lost on organizations with deep pockets. 

The ACLU of Montana, which does not endorse candidates, says it is planning to spend $1.3 million to inform voters about some of the candidates’ positions. “The Montana Supreme Court races that are up in November are enormously consequential and will have real-life impacts on all Montanans,” Alex Rate, the ACLU of Montana’s interim deputy director, told Bolts, adding that these are particularly vital to elections policy. “The right to vote is that right from which almost all of our other rights flow,” he said. “It’s the foundation for our house of democracy.” 

Montanans for a Fair Judiciary, a PAC affiliated with the Montana Republican Party, began spending on behalf of Wilson and Swanson during the springtime primaries.The Judicial Fairness Initiative, an arm of the national Republican State Legislative Committee devoted to promoting conservative judicial candidates, has said it will include Montana in a multi-state, “seven-figure” investment this cycle. The National Democratic Redistricting Committee and Planned Parenthood Votes committed months ago to include Montana in their own seven-figure multi-state campaign. Another state PAC, Montanans for Fair and Impartial Courts, is already spending more than $400,000 on supporting Lynch, according to the Free Press. 

The four candidates’ official campaigns face strict contribution limits, but still have combined to raise over half a million dollars. 

Much more money, both to the official campaigns and from outside groups, is sure to flow in the coming weeks.

It’s ironic: among the many ways this court has leaned left, even as the state otherwise zipped right, was in a 2012 decision that upheld the state’s limits on corporate campaign contributions—a startling act of defiance toward the U.S. Supreme Court’s landmark Citizens United ruling, which had struck down campaign finance rules like Montana’s in 2010.

McGrath wrote the majority decision in that 2012 case, calling for the state to stand up to the “multi-front attack on both contribution restrictions and the transparency that accompanies campaign disclosure requirements.” 

The U.S. Supreme Court promptly shot down McGrath, in a two-paragraph ruling that reopened the floodgates to immense amounts of outside campaign spending. 

Now, more than a decade later, as McGrath steps away, the race to replace him and his retiring colleague is on track to smash the judicial spending records Montana set just two years ago.

The post “It’s Our Last Backstop”: How Voting Access in Montana Rides on Supreme Court Races appeared first on Bolts.

All these officials were elected by voters in the 2022 midterms, a busy cycle that saw a coordinated (and largely unsuccessful) effort by followers of Donald Trump to take over election administration. Two years later, a new round of states are selecting their chief election officials.

Twelve states are deciding in November who will run their elections going forward. 

That role is directly on the ballot in seven states; in five others, voters will elect a governor or lawmakers who’ll then get to appoint their elections chief. 

In most of these states, this elections chief is the secretary of state; but in a few, there is another office that has that authority—for instance, in Utah, it’s the lieutenant governor.

Today Bolts is publishing a new guide that walks you through these elections in all 12 states.

In some of these states, including Missouri, Oregon, and Vermont, a candidate is once again running who has clearly embraced false conspiracy theories that the 2020 election was stolen from Trump. They’ve proposed taking drastic actions such as ending mail-in voting.

In other states, such as New Hampshire or Utah, the office is unlikely to fall into the hands of an election denier. But even these races can be critical to the shape of democracy. Secretaries of state or the equivalent official often design voter outreach programs, or set policies that can make voter registration easy or difficult. They can also champion new election legislation or maneuver to stall ballot initiatives. 

The exact roles that states attribute to their chief elections officials differ from state to state—for instance, some have a hand in election certification and others do not. To clarify this landscape, Bolts has published two databases. The first details, state by state, which offices prepare and administer an election (Who Runs our Elections?). The second details, state by state, which offices handle the counting, canvassing, and certification stages (Who Counts Our Elections?). 

Explore our state breakdown of the 2024 elections below.

Delaware (via the governor’s race)

In Delaware, voters do not elect a secretary of state; instead, the governor appoints a state election commissioner. And voters this fall are choosing a new governor between New Castle County Executive Matt Meyer, a Democrat who is the heavy frontrunner in this blue state, and House Minority Leader Michael Ramone, a Republican. 

The two candidates have taken very different stances toward election reforms. As a legislator, Ramone fought Democratic efforts to expand the availability of mail voting, while Meyer supported those changes. Meyer also says he would promote voting among some groups who are traditionally marginalized, vowing in response to an ACLU questionnaire to seek automatic registration of people exiting incarceration, and by expanding ballot access in local jails.

Maine (via legislative races)

Secretary of State Shenna Bellows, a Democrat, became a national figure in late 2023 when she took Trump’s name off of the state’s ballot, citing his support for an insurrection. (The U.S. Supreme Court later put Trump back on the ballot.) Whether the office changes hands next year depends on Maine’s legislative races: Lawmakers select a secretary of state every two years. 

If Democrats retain the legislature, they could keep Bellows in office; Bellows told Bolts that she will seek another term. But the GOP has an outside shot at flipping the legislature in November. The last time they did that, in 2010, they replaced the Democratic secretary of state with a Republican. Democrats took back control of the legislature, and the secretary of state’s office, in 2012.

Missouri (via the race for secretary of state)

The secretary of state’s office in Missouri could fall into the hands of an ultraconservative Republican who has unambiguously embraced Trump’s lies about fraud and who vows that this would guide his tenure. “We have to ensure that none of the electoral fraud that took place in 2020 and stole the election from President Trump happens here,” Denny Hoskins, a state senator, told local media after winning a crowded GOP primary last month.

Hoskins, who is the front-runner in November in this staunch red state, has designs for major changes to election administration. He wants to hand count ballots and effectively eliminate absentee voting in an effort, his website says, to “root out election fraud and protect our elections from Chinese/Russian interference.”

He now faces Barbara Phifer, a Democratic state representative who broadly opposes his plans. She is also emphasizing her support for direct democracy, warning against GOP proposals to make it harder to pass citizen-initiated ballot initiatives. Hoskins championed such an effort this year, saying he was worried about the progressive push for an abortion rights measure.

Montana (via the race for secretary of state)

Secretary of State Christi Jacobsen, a Republican who is running for reelection, wants to make it harder for Montanans to vote. In 2021, her first year on the job, she strongly backed efforts by GOP lawmakers to toughen voter ID laws, end same-day registration, and make it more difficult to obtain an absentee ballot. Those policies were struck down earlier this year by the state’s liberal-leaning supreme court, and Jacobsen is now trying to get the conservative U.S. Supreme Court to revive them on appeal. 

Jacobsen has also used her authority to stall ballot initiatives, recently blocking some signatures on petitions for measures to strengthen abortion rights and bring about election reforms. 

Her Democratic opponent this November, Jesse James Mullen, says he is “appalled” by Jacobsen’s “efforts to disenfranchise Montanans.” Mullen, who owns a chain of local newspapers in Montana, opposes the GOP’s 2021 voting laws Jacobsen backed and criticizes Republicans for using false threats of voter fraud in Montana to justify new restrictions. Mullen will be an underdog in this red-leaning state that Trump is expected to decisively carry.

New Hampshire (via legislative races)

The secretary of state in New Hampshire is selected by lawmakers every two years, right after the state holds legislative elections. In the most recent such vote, in late 2022, Republican David Scanlan prevailed over a Democratic alternative. He benefited from the fact that the GOP narrowly controlled the state legislature but also got dozens of crossover votes from Democrats. That puts into question whether Democrats would oust Scanlan even if they take control of the legislature in November: In 2018, the most recent cycle in which Democrats won control of the legislature, just enough Democrats joined Republicans to reelect a secretary of state who had been supporting Republican restrictions on voter access.

Since becoming secretary of state in 2022, Scanlan has backed his party’s newest restrictions, including the proposal to require proof of citizenship when people want to register to vote.

North Carolina (via the governor’s race and/or legislative races)

While North Carolina is electing a secretary of state this year, this office has nothing to do with election administration. (For aficionados of secretary of state races, let the record reflect that longtime Democratic incumbent Elaine Marshall is seeking an eighth term against Republican Chad Brown, a county commissioner.) 

Instead, it’s the gubernatorial and legislative races that’ll determine who controls the appointed offices that oversee elections: the state board of elections, and the director of elections. 

But even then, it’s not clear who will have what power come 2025. Last year, in an ongoing effort to shrink the powers of their Democratic governor, North Carolina’s Republican lawmakers used their veto-proof majority to pass a new law stripping the governor of his influence over appointments and shifting more authority to the legislature. This was widely seen as a way to strip Democrats of their majority on the board and change the current director of elections, Karen Brinson Bell, who has questioned why the GOP is passing so many changes to election laws and has frustrated some conservatives who would like to see the state pursue fraud investigations more aggressively. 

The new law is currently caught up in court, however. The stakes of the battle over appointment powers are high: Democrats and Republicans have been clashing on a wide range of voting issues in the state, including same-day voter registration and voter ID laws.

Oregon (via the race for secretary of state)

Oregon has frequently led the way in expanding ballot access, including by pioneering universal mail voting and automatic voter registration. Democrat Tobias Read, currently state treasurer, says he is running for secretary of state this year to uphold that tradition. “Any effort to make it easier for people to vote, to remove barriers, is a good thing,” he told Bolts earlier this year, ahead of his primary victory.

Read’s Republican opponent, state Senator Dennis Linthicum, could hardly be more different, as Bolts reported in May. He is proposing to ban mail voting, despite the fact that most of the state votes by mail. He joined far-right lawmakers nationwide in 2020 to call for an audit of the 2020 presidential election based on unsubstantiated claims of fraud. And he has not committed to certifying election results, the role of a secretary of state.

Read is favored to win this race; Oregonians haven’t elected any Republican to statewide office since 2016. That would leave Linthicum without an office. He was barred from seeking another term in the state Senate because he participated in a prolonged GOP statehouse walkout in 2023.

Tennessee (via legislative races)

The secretary of state in Tennessee is not directly elected. Instead, the legislature chooses a secretary of state, who then names a state coordinator of elections—and that’s the person who state law designates as Tennessee’s chief elections official.

Republicans are massively favored to retain both chambers of the state legislature, making it very unlikely that election administration will take a different route. Secretary of State Tre Hargett has been in office since 2009, and he easily secured a new four-year term in 2021.

Mark Goins, the elections coordinator appointed by Hargett back in 2009, acted last year to drastically shut down people’s ability to regain their right to vote after a felony conviction, imposing new financial fees to even apply, and making success an extremely tall order. Hargett and Goins have backed restrictions on voter registration and mail voting, and have opposed Democratic proposals to boost turnout.

Vermont (via the race for secretary of state)

In a rematch of the 2022 race, Secretary of State Sarah Copeland Hanzas, a Democrat, faces H. Brooke Paige, a perennial Republican candidate who has fully embraced Trump’s lies about the 2020 election. The Big Lie does not sell in blue Vermont: Copeland Hanzas won the 2022 election 61 percent to 33 percent. There’s no indication that 2024 will be any different. 

“It is highly worrisome to hear people echoing false claims and misinformation about the safety and security of our elections,” Copeland Hanzas told Bolts two years ago. “It is a fundamental threat to our democracy, in that the purpose of these claims is to discourage people from participating in elections.” 

Copeland Hanzas has supported efforts by some Vermont municipalities to expand the franchise locally. Bolts has reported, for instance, on the organizing that led several cities to allow noncitizen residents to participate in local elections on Town Hall days. “We heard from these communities about why they thought it was important to be able to welcome people into the democratic franchise at the local level,” Copeland Hanzas told Bolts on why she helped authorize those reforms while in the legislature.

Utah (via the race for lieutenant governor)

Utahns abolished their secretary of state’s office in 1976, transferring the authority to oversee elections to the lieutenant governor instead.

Lieutenant Governor Deidre Henderson, a Republican, is running for reelection this year. She barely survived the GOP primary against a conservative activist who had helped organized a ballot measure to restrict mail voting and voter access. During her first term, Henderson refused to leave a bipartisan election organization that’s come under conservative fire, saying she wouldn’t bow to “radical election deniers.”

In Utah’s general elections, lieutenant governors appear on a ticket with their running-mate as part of the governor’s race, so Henderson’s fate is tied to the race between Governor Spencer Cox and Democrats’ gubernatorial nominee Brian King, who is running on a ticket with Rebekah Cummings, a librarian at the University of Utah. In this staunchly red state, it’ll be an uphill climb for Democrats to land a statewide win.

Washington (via the race for secretary of state)

In 2022, a Democrat won the secretary of state’s office for the first time in a half-century. But that was in a special election, and Steve Hobbs now has to run for a full term against Republican Dale Whitaker, the former executive director of a conservative organization. 

Whitaker, who associated himself with “America First grassroots patriots” at his state party’s convention, has taken issue with some of the state’s election rules. He has made public comments against the availability of mail voting, despite running in a state where voters trust and widely use mail ballots. “I will fight for same-day in-person voting with paper ballots,” he said in April. Hobbs supports the mail voting system. Whitaker has also taken issue with Hobbs’ decision, as part of the settlement of a lawsuit filed last year, to agree to a consent decree that removes a requirement that Washington residents wait 30 days to register to vote when they move to a new address. Whitaker, who said a “reasonable registration deadline” is important, did not reply to a request for comment on whether he supports the state’s same-day voter registration rules.

Hobbs received 48 percent in the August all-party primary, which is generally predictive of the November results, with another Democrat taking 10 percent. Whitaker received 37 percent, leaving him an underdog in November. 

West Virginia (via the race for secretary of state)

West Virginia’s outgoing secretary of state, Republican Mac Warner, says the CIA robbed Trump of victory in 2020 and attended a “Stop the Steal” rally late that year. He unsuccessfully ran for governor this year. The favorite to replace him as secretary of state? His brother Kris Warner, who also refuses to call the 2020 results legitimate.

Kris Warner is currently the director of the state’s Economic Development Authority. As he runs to become West Virginia’s next top elections official, he’s promising to purge voter rolls and figures to fit neatly within a state Republican Party that has deeply embraced election denial.

His Democratic opponent, local attorney Thornton Cooper, has said he was motivated to run because he views the Warner brothers as particular threats to democracy. But it’s become very difficult for Democrats to win in West Virginia, and Cooper doesn’t seem to be trying much. He has no functioning campaign website as of publication and, according to the state’s data, he has spent under $2,000 on this race.

What about the remaining states?

Of the 38 states that aren’t on this list, the vast majority will hold elections for secretary of state, or an equivalent office, in 2026. (Check out Bolts’ national primer from 2022 for more on how many of these states’ elections unfolded last time around.) But before that, the next milestone looms in 2025: New Jersey and Virginia will host wide open governor’s races, and the two winners will get to select their state’s secretaries of state.

The post Your Guide to All 12 States Choosing Their Next Elections Chief in November appeared first on Bolts.

Jeff Buongiorno, a slate member in Palm Beach County, has called elections in Florida “a conspiracy from the top down,” alleging that the state’s GOP leadership is enabling noncitizens to vote. Chris Gleason, the candidate in Pinellas County, has baselessly claimed that the local supervisor, Republican Julie Marcus, had made Pinellas “ground zero” of mail voter fraud.

The candidates hail from different corners of the state but many have held joint events and press conferences and they’ve appeared on podcasts as a group to air their grievances. “Every single one of them is running because they saw their local SOE not following election law properly or not maintaining their voting rolls, and they got really upset,” Cathi Chamberlain, who is loosely coordinating this coalition of 13 candidates and is the founder of Pinellas Watchdogs, a group that circulates fringe theories about fraud, said on a right-wing podcast in July.

The group hit a wall in Tuesday’s GOP primaries. 

Six of its members were defeated by incumbent Republican supervisors, including Gleason in Pinellas County. A seventh candidate trailed in his primary’s initial count.

But elsewhere in the state, six more coalition members, including Buongiorno, are advancing to the general election. They’ll continue their bid to take over supervisor offices into November. 

“Many of my colleagues have been worn down by the atmosphere we find ourselves in but it has only strengthened my resolve,” incumbent Hillsborough County Supervisor of Elections Craig Latimer, a Democrat who’ll face slate member Billy Christensen in the fall, told Bolts.

Christensen was unopposed in Hillsborough County’s Republican primary. He’s one of four slate members who moved to November with no intraparty competition, alongside the candidates in Alachua, Palm Beach, and Osceola counties. Alachua is staunchly blue. Hillsborough, Palm Beach, and Osceola all flipped from voting for Democrat Joe Biden in 2020 to voting for Republican Ron DeSantis in 2022.

Two other coalition members moved forward after winning contested GOP primaries in Monroe County and Seminole County. Both will also face Democrats in November. 

Slate candidates lost, often by overwhelming margins, in Pinellas, Charlotte, Collier, Lake, Lee, and Santa Rosa counties. In St. Lucie County, a manual recount is expected to stretch into next week; it’ll decide whether coalition member George Umansky, who trailed by just two votes in the initial count out of roughly 25,000 cast, moves on to face Democratic Supervisor Gertrude Walker. (Editor’s note: The recount confirmed that Umansky lost the primary to Republican Jennifer Frey by four votes.)

“We are extremely concerned that people trying to shake the public’s trust in elections are seeking to run our elections,” said Brad Ashwell, the state director for All Voting is Local, a nonprofit organization that works to make it easier for marginalized communities to vote. 

“Voters saw through the lies and voted down a lot of these candidates,” Ashwell said of Tuesday’s results. “We are really hopeful the other candidates moving into the general see those losses and realize it is not a winning strategy.”

Supervisors of elections in Florida are responsible for running elections within their county; they oversee voter registration, design ballots, conduct voter outreach, and process mail ballots. 

They can’t unilaterally change election rules set by lawmakers and the secretary of state. So the slate’s candidates wouldn’t have the authority to execute the changes some of them are proposing, such as ending the use of voting machines or banning all mail voting. 

Still, Ashwell warned, county officials would have opportunities to upend the system. They may grow more aggressive in purging registered voters based on minor errors on their forms, rejecting more mail ballots based on technicalities, and using dodgy AI tools to chase down issues on voter rolls. A far-right group has been pressuring local election officials to purge voters based on lists generated by the tool Eagle AI, which scrubs voter rolls to identify inconsistencies with other public databases; the state’s top elections official encouraged local offices to “take action” based on those lists, but voting rights advocates warn that these lists are not reliable.

Counties also have a lot of discretion on how accessible to make voting—how many drop boxes to install, how long early voting locations are open. And some slate members signaled they’d curtail access. “‘Easy to Vote’ MEANS ‘Easy to Cheat,’” their candidate in Lake County, who lost on Tuesday, wrote on his website. 

No supervisor can single-handedly refuse to certify their county’s election results, but they all sit on the three-person body responsible for certification.

Some of the slate’s candidates have drawn support from prominent figures who support election denier networks, such as Mike Lindell, the CEO of MyPillow, and billionaire Richard Uihlein.

But not all thirteen candidates align on what took place in the 2020 election, and whether there’s widespread fraud within Florida—or only in the states that Trump lost. 

Several slate candidates have asserted without evidence that Florida officials are erasing tens of thousands of votes. Others like Sherri Hodies, who won an open GOP primary in Monroe County, home to Key West, have said they trust Florida but believe there are issues with the count in Michigan or Georgia, states where Trump has denied his 2020 losses. 

Meanwhile, Amy Pennock, the slate’s candidate in Seminole County, told the Miami Herald that she does not think the 2020 election was stolen.

Pennock, who did not respond to a request for comment, is the only slate candidate who beat an incumbent in Tuesday’s Republican primary. She ousted Chris Anderson, whose tenure involved major clashes with the county’s other GOP officials. Anderson, who is Black, said last year that he was encountering racial discrimination that was making it harder for him to do his job. And he accused members of the county commission of racism in a social media video. Anderson also faced a complaint this month for allegedly using his role as supervisor to boost his own campaign, but a judge tossed the claim after finding no evidence. 

Pennock, a conservative member of the county school board who last year proposed to review and restrict access to some books in public school libraries, will now face Democrat Deborah Poulalion in November.

Poulalion told Bolts that she worries that misinformation about election fraud could weaken the security and accessibility of Florida’s voting system. “One of the worst things that came out of 2020 was losing confidence in the integrity of the system,” she said. “I think the system is still working, but the lack of confidence in the system could lead to making changes that make the system less effective.” 

Since the 2020 election, DeSantis and Republican lawmakers extensively restricted Florida’s voting laws, ostensibly to boost voters’ confidence. They toughened voter ID requirements, made it harder to vote by mail, and have set up a new police force to investigate fraud.  

Lake County Supervisor of Elections Alan Hays, a Republican who defeated a slate candidate on Tuesday, told Bolts that he is satisfied by the result of his own primary. But he regrets that a lot of harm has already been done to the state’s voting systems.

“I certainly think it is a rebuke of the nonsense that has been spread,” he said of Tuesday’s results. “Unfortunately, we’ve had too many legislators already listen to the garbage that has been voiced by this side of the equation. That’s why some of the election laws have been modified the way they have.” 

Hays is part of the Florida Supervisors of Elections, a professional membership organization that lobbies state lawmakers on behalf of local elections officials. The organization has worked to dispel misinformation and fight proposals that risk jamming up the election process.  Hays, for instance, has spoken out against proposed legislation that would allow local officials to count votes by hand rather than use machines. This has become a rallying cry for conservatives who doubt election results, despite evidence that hand counting is error prone and expensive.

“Our association has been very active and we have been able to help craft the legislative changes so they are not as offensive as they would have been,” Hays told Bolts.

But Ashwell worries that, if more election deniers took over as local supervisors, they may use the association as a platform to advocate for statewide changes. 

“When we have more and more of these election denial candidates winning races, it changes the tenor of the association,” Ashwell said. “If they change the willingness of that association to weigh in on a bill to allow hand counts, then that could become standard in Florida.”

Christensen, the “America First” coalition’s candidate in Hillsborough County, told Bolts that he is eager to change the politics of the statewide association. He thinks the group has a thumb on the scale, and is weakening trust in elections by failing to address issues.

Picking up a key conservative grievance about the 2020 election, Christensen has blamed Latimer, the Democratic incumbent, for accepting a large grant to help run elections that year from a nonprofit organization with ties to Mark Zuckerberg, the founder of Facebook. These grants were distributed to thousands of election offices nationwide, but Trump-aligned conservatives have pointed to them to make unfounded claims that local election offices conducted inappropriate activities that year. 

Florida and dozens of other GOP-run states have banned private grants to election offices since 2020. Florida supervisors’ professional association successfully lobbied in 2021 to water down that legislation, fearing that it’d leave them cash-strapped and needing to cut crucial operations.

But Christensen also says it was a local issue, rather than presidential headlines, that led him to run for office. His family was affected by a data breach at the Hillsborough County supervisor of elections office; the county disclosed last year that a hacker accessed the driver’s licenses and social security numbers of about 58,000 residents. Latimer sent notifications to people impacted by the breach: The county’s voter registration database and tabulation system had additional security protections and were not affected, according to Latimer’s office.

Christensen casts the breach as an example of security gaps that make the county vulnerable. “When there are challenges, why is there a resistance to implementing new rules to address those challenges, for the betterment of everyone?” he asked. 

He said he’d allocate more of the office budget to security, and that he wants to “run audits locally” of the county’s elections. Following the 2020 election, conservative activists nationwide have demanded audits of local election systems. In Florida, Trump’s allies called for a forensic audit of the 2020 results, but DeSantis refused to organize one, angering the former president; some members of the “America First” slate, like Alachua County’s Judith Jensen, want to organize hand audits of future elections.

Latimer told Bolts that Christensen’s statements about the breach are an “outright lie and a completely irresponsible attempt to instill fear among our electorate.” He said, “It was a basic network intrusion that was discovered and contained quickly, before it could escalate to ransomware or anything more serious.”

On Wednesday, Christensen launched a video pointing out that Hillsborough County’s elections website crashed the day before, on election night. “This incident highlights the urgent need for new leadership to maintain trust in our election processes,” he said in the video.

The websites of dozens of counties crashed on Tuesday night, a widespread outage tied to the fact that many shared the same vendor. The vendor took responsibility, saying that its systems were overwhelmed by the increased traffic of people looking for election results. 

“Their technical issues didn’t slow us down or impede the results reporting at all,” Latimer said, “because I had backup plans in place. Our results were uploaded to the state, shared on social media and reported in our public Canvassing Board meeting, just as they always are. And yet my opponent immediately became accusatory once again.”

He continued, “It is absolutely critical that we have the right people in these positions to ensure that our elections continue to be run with actual integrity—and not threatened by those who don’t understand what that means.”

Hays, the Republican supervisor of Lake County who won his primary on Tuesday, agrees with Latimer; he told Bolts that the response to the crash shows how election skeptics fixate on an issue and conflate it with election fraud, with no evidence that any vote was affected. 

“It had nothing to do with any malicious activity. It had nothing to do with the local county. It has absolutely nothing to do with our tabulation system,” Hays said. 

“These people are blinded by their obsession and they refuse to acknowledge the facts,” Hays continued. “They don’t come up with any concrete evidence. All they bring you is hypothetical garbage. And too many people believe their nonsense.”

Editor’s note (Aug. 28): The article has been updated to include the results of the recount in the GOP primary for St. Lucie County, and a modified characterization of Amy Pennock’s proposals on public school books.

The post Six “America First” Candidates, Vying to Take Over Florida Elections, Advance to November appeared first on Bolts.

Practitioners like Pernick need to go town by town, village by village, collecting and cleaning data themselves, often spending hundreds of hours on mundane tasks just to get this basic information. That is, if local election offices are even willing to provide it in the first place. 

School districts across New York are especially prone to discrimination because they often use at-large voting systems that can marginalize residents of color, Pernick explained. But the lack of accessible data poses obstacles to investigating them. “There’s something like 700 school districts across New York and the only way to do an analysis of those school districts is to go one-at-a-time and send an open records request to each one,” Pernick told Bolts. “There could be confusion and delay in responding to requests that could push back even the beginning of an investigation by months.” 

“Because of these challenges in identifying and gathering data, we knew that in some jurisdictions where there is racial discrimination in voting, it would be difficult or even impossible to prove it,” he added. 

Perry Grossman, director of voting rights at the New York Civil Liberties Union, shares Pernick’s frustration at the countless hours his team has poured into data gathering, often dealing with resistant or unresponsive local offices. “I shouldn’t have to threaten to sue counties to get this data,” he said.

The New York Senate passed legislation in January that would mandate a centralized state election database that anyone could access. But the bill has since languished in the Assembly, leaving its champions anxious that the problems may endure well past the next round of elections this fall. 

And the problem extends far beyond New York. Precinct-level election data underpins a world of election analyses. It’s a foundation for Voting Rights Act lawsuits throughout the country. Proving how badly maps are gerrymandered is impossible without this data, since it’s needed to assess districts’ partisanship. It’s also used to make all sorts of maps, graphics and tools of neighborhood partisan trends. And combining precinct partisanship data with demographic, geographic and income data is used to address a wide range of political science questions, including showing that voter fraud claims in the 2020 election were unfounded. 

Yet there is no entity in the United States that records election returns or maintains boundary maps for the country’s 180,000 precincts. Many states don’t even provide this data for the full collection of precincts within their borders. Instead, universities, newsrooms, nonprofits and volunteers collectively spend thousands of hours after every major election gathering it themselves. 

It’s a Herculean task for organizations that are often short on time and resources, and leaves the people who need precinct data at the mercy of individual county or local election offices whose data quality varies drastically. It also burdens underfunded election officials who are inundated with repeated requests for the same data. 

Some states make this process a lot easier than others. For example, Minnesota’s secretary of state’s office posts the entire state’s precinct-level election results together on its website; it also provides digital maps of precinct boundaries, called shapefiles. 

The variation between states was captured in dramatic visual form in a project published by The New York Times after the 2020 election. A team of journalists, data scientists, and developers set out to produce a map of U.S. precincts, color-coded by how each voted. 

Four states on the map—Alabama, Alaska, Louisiana, and Virginia—are completely blank, as are large swaths of Idaho, Kentucky, and Missouri.

It took The Times three months of full-time data and software development work to assemble the data after the election, plus months of preparation ahead of election night, according to Miles Watkins, who helped manage the project. “As of when we published the nationwide map, I feel pretty confident that we were using every single piece of open data or FOIA-able information that we could,” he told Bolts. But even with that effort, one of the best-staffed publications in the nation wasn’t able to obtain the data to complete the map. 

Ultimately, over 10 percent of all votes cast in the election weren’t pictured in the map.

One problem that proved intractable was that some counties report a combination of their mail-in, early, and provisional ballots as one lump total, rather than distributing them based on where voters reside at the precinct-level. This practice prevents analyses of voting patterns at a more granular level, as was the case in the four completely blank states in The Times’ map.

Zach Mahafza, an analyst at the Southern Poverty Law Center who investigates voting rights violations in the South, says this lack of precinct data often stalls his efforts. In 2021, he was part of a team looking into the city council map of Mobile, Alabama. The 2020 Census showed that Mobile was majority-Black. But  there were only three majority-Black districts in their seven-district city council map. Stand Up Mobile, a local voting rights organization, enlisted Mahafza and the SPLC to see whether a new council map could be drawn with at least four majority-Black districts where Black residents would have a meaningful opportunity to elect their preferred candidate. They needed precinct level election returns and precinct maps for the project.

The city of Mobile provided maps in PDF format, forcing Mahafza to jump through various hoops to extract reliable data. “We’d have a zoom-in of this precinct in the northern part of the city, and another precinct in the southern part of the city and trying to weave all that back together got very difficult,” he said. He estimated that recreating the city’s maps took him 80 to 85 hours.

Ultimately Mahafza’s team showed that it was indeed possible to draw such a map; they warned local leaders that they may violate the VRA if they failed to ensure that Black voters were fairly represented when they redistricted the map. The city eventually adopted a map that has four districts with voting age populations that are over 53 percent Black.

To show that a map or election system violates the VRA’s ban on racial discrimination, plaintiffs must demonstrate several features about their jurisdiction, including racial polarization among voters; that is, whether different racial groups actually prefer different candidates. Practitioners conduct these analyses by looking at the demographic makeup and election returns of individual precincts and inferring the voting preferences of different populations. “If you don’t have precinct-level election returns, you have no way to show racially polarized voting,” Ruth Greenwood, director of the Election Law Clinic at Harvard Law School, told Bolts.

“We couldn’t enforce the federal or any state voting rights act if we didn’t have precinct-level data,” Greenwood added.

In the absence of centralized information, a number of organizations have cropped up to fill the gap. OpenElections, a volunteer group of journalists and software developers, the Voting and Election Science Team from the University of Florida and Wichita State University, the Redistricting Data Hub and the MIT Election Lab have all poured resources into collecting, standardizing and publishing precinct-level election results or compiling precinct shapefile maps. 

After the 2020 presidential election, while The Times was embarking on their nationwide precinct map, the MIT Election Lab set out to make its own database of the country’s precinct results. It took a dozen computer scientists and political scientists nearly two years to complete this project—just in time to start over again after the 2022 midterms. Only about 10 states had data organized enough to put in their database without much work. For the remaining states, they wrote code to clean data, called county offices to get returns that weren’t posted online, used Optical Character Recognition software to read election returns from PDF files and other images and designed quality control processes to check their work. 

They even found the precinct-level results of a recount in Idaho’s Bonner County from a newspaper picture of numbers written on a whiteboard, recalled Samuel Baltz, a research scientist in the group. 

Tired of hitting a wall after every election cycle, some researchers and lawyers are pushing for reform, demanding that states clean up and post complete precinct-level data in accessible formats.

In early 2018, Kansas data scientist Peter Karman emailed his state representative, Boog Highberger, with just such a proposal. He had just spent months trying to compile the state’s precinct data by calling county offices, wrangling it out of PDF files and tediously matching precinct names between digital maps and spreadsheets. He thought the Kansas secretary of state’s office should be required to publish the data on its website. 

Highberger initiated a bill to address these issues, and Karman provided testimony in both chambers. He even included requests for data formatting: “publish the spreadsheet as a spreadsheet, not as a picture of a spreadsheet,” he implored. Within four months, Karman stood by as Governor Jeff Colyer signed legislation that required the secretary of state’s office to post precinct-level data on its website for all federal, statewide, and legislative races within 30 days of the final election canvass. 

More recently, Connecticut mandated a statewide elections database as part of its new Voting Rights Act; the broader legislation is part of a multistate effort to reproduce voting rights protections that federal courts have eroded. Pernick, the Legal Defense Fund lawyer, said the law’s database component was modeled after the legislative proposal in New York.

The New York bill, which Pernick and Grossman helped draft, would establish a statewide database that would house centralized election data and shapefiles for the entire state, down to the precinct level. Sponsored by Senator Zellnor Myrie, the proposal first passed the Senate in 2022, but didn’t receive a hearing in the state Assembly by the end of that legislative session. 

The reform’s latest version, Senate Bill S657A, is in danger of suffering the same fate, having passed the state’s upper-chamber in January but now stuck again in the House Election Law Committee. The committee is chaired by Latrice Walker, who is also a sponsor of the bill. Myrie and Walker did not return a request for comment. 

In the meantime, people who want New York precinct data have been left to their own devices, compiling the data on their own. Ben Rosenblatt, an independent New York political consultant who has worked on Democratic campaigns in the state, decided to cobble together a statewide precinct shapefile in 2022. He posted his progress on Twitter as he went, announcing it was complete in December 2023 after a year of gathering and cleaning data from each of New York’s 62 counties. The Times’ 2020 mapping project cites Rosenblatt’s work as its only New York data source.

“I’m trying to do it again this year for 2024,” Rosenblatt told Bolts.

Bills with similar provisions have been introduced in Michigan and New Jersey. Florida’s and Maryland’s versions did not move forward by the end of this year’s legislative sessions.

If this type of regulation existed in every state, with each state cleaning and posting their own precinct data in accessible formats, the resources spent on this task by outside groups would change drastically, if not cease altogether. 

Bolts asked Watkins how long his team would have needed to complete the data for The Times’ mapping project under these conditions. It probably would have taken “a few days,” he said. He paused to reflect and then added, “Maybe one week.”

The post Election Data Is Vital to Voting Rights. So Why Is It So Hard to Track Down? appeared first on Bolts.

But Ramos, who directs the Wisconsin Democracy Campaign, an organization that promotes good government, says he may not volunteer in the future if voters approve Question 2, a constitutional amendment on the state’s April 2 ballot. “This thing gets passed, and I’d be very afraid to do that again,” he told Bolts.

The measure would require that only “an election official designated by law may perform tasks in the conduct of primaries, elections or referendums.” It can easily read as an innocuous codification of existing statute, and it has generated no campaign spending on either side of the issue since Republican lawmakers chose to place it on the ballot late last year.

Among advocates for voting rights and for well-resourced election administration, however, this under-the-radar proposal is alarming. A slew of lawyers, elections experts, and nonprofit leaders tell Bolts Question 2 is written so vaguely as to invite lawsuits over what constitutes a “task” and what, exactly, it means to help “conduct” an election. 

They fear this confusion will have a chilling effect on the many non-governmental groups and volunteers who assist in election administration. If it passes, the measure is set to go into effect this year, ahead of November’s presidential election in which Wisconsin is again considered a critical swing state.

Victoria Bassetti, an expert on election law who has been involved in Wisconsin politics for three decades, believes this amendment would call into question the legality of any number of actions that these volunteers and outside organizations routinely perform in aid of the nearly 2,000 county and municipal clerks who run Wisconsin’s elections. 

“It adds pretty substantial burdens and legal doubts onto the shoulders of hardworking local election administrators, who, faced with this new provision, are going to see help that they previously relied upon fade away, are going to face substantial litigation risks, and are going to be unable to call upon expert advice and help from a variety of fields, including IT, security, and ballot design,” said Bassetti, a senior advisor at States United Democracy Center, a nonpartisan group that advocates for ballot access. 

“I do feel like people are treating it like an afterthought, but Question 2 is a big deal,” said Eileen Newcomer, who leads voter education efforts for the League of Women Voters in Wisconsin, “and the way that this question is phrased does lead to a lot of uncertainty about how it would be enforced.”

This measure appears alongside Question 1, a related constitutional amendment that would ban election offices in the state from accepting or spending money donated by outside, non-governmental groups. Both measures are part of the continued fallout of the 2020 presidential election, and the conspiracies about widespread election fraud that have characterized Republican politics—especially in Wisconsin—ever since. Democratic state lawmakers unanimously opposed placing Questions 1 and 2 on the ballot, arguing that the state should better finance elections before restricting outside aid.

Question 1 responds to a controversy that emerged in the fall of 2020, when a previously low-profile nonprofit called the Center for Tech and Civic Life distributed about $350 million, donated by billionaires Mark Zuckerberg and Priscilla Chan, to local elections offices around the country to assist in election administration at the height of the COVID-19 pandemic. These local offices, many underfunded and understaffed already, were scrambling at the time to outfit poll workers with personal protective equipment, establish drive-through voting, and process record levels of mail-in ballots.

Republicans were and still are outraged at the influx of cash, and have argued consistently that the donors intended to benefit liberal areas and boost turnout by Democrats, despite a lack of evidence of such favoritism or interference. Three and a half years on, this country’s response to the donation has been resounding: 27 states, most of which went for Donald Trump in 2020, have adopted bans on private funding for election administration. It would now hardly be groundbreaking if Wisconsin passes a ban of its own and becomes the 28th. (Wisconsin would have already joined this list, but for a veto by Democratic Governor Tony Evers in 2021.)

While Question 1 confronts outside money, Question 2 would affect the outside labor that goes into making elections run smoothly. 

Among many examples of people who could arguably run afoul of the law if Question 2 passes, elections experts told Bolts, are representatives of voting-machine companies who commonly help troubleshoot during elections. And what about outside organizations who perform routine data analysis for local elections offices? Newcomer said that such work helps clerks decide how to spend limited resources—where to establish polling places, how to disperse staff, and so on.

Said Sam Liebert, a former clerk in three different small Wisconsin communities, “Some of these clerks are in towns and villages of 100 or 200 people, and they run elections out of living rooms and kitchens, and they have their 8-year-old daughters helping lick envelopes to send out absentee ballots. Where does this stop?”

Liebert, who now directs the Wisconsin branch of the national nonprofit advocacy group All Voting is Local, was leading elections in a town of about 12,000 people outside of Milwaukee during the 2020 cycle, and he said he relied on the assistance of folks who, under Question 2, could be seen as lacking the legal authorization to do that work in the future.

About 3,000 people in his town had requested absentee ballots that year for the November general election, and Liebert said he and his small staff could not alone have gotten the ballots sent out on time. He called in help from the town’s Parks and Recreation director and foreman, he said, and from technicians who are normally tasked with cleaning and maintaining park bathrooms and infrastructure. “We had an assembly line, getting ballots into envelopes and mail machines and getting them stamped,” Liebert said.

Wisconsin law already vests in local elections officials the power and responsibility to hire and train poll workers, and to discharge them if they break the law. Republicans who control the state legislature want to build upon this and turn the policy into a constitutional provision that could only be undone with another statewide vote.

But the law also has specific rules for who does and doesn’t qualify to be a poll worker; state statute lays out residency requirements and commands that workers undergo training before assisting in elections.

Should Question 2 pass, experts told Bolts, local clerks would have to be careful in deciding whom to call upon for help, and in making sure to remember to swear in as a poll worker anyone who performs a “task” of election administration—lest they slip up and find themselves lead characters in lawsuits. 

But it won’t be enough, Bassetti said, for clerks to simply err on the side of caution by administering an oath of office whenever they fear they’re in a gray area. She said many would not meet the standards set by state statute, listing a wide range of workers she fears would be affected: “the IT consultant who’s there to help you troubleshoot, the security person who’s there to help you, the friendly school person who wants to help you organize things, or the ballot-design person helping you fit 17 things onto one sheet of paper,” among others.

During debate over the measures in November in the state Senate, Republican Senator Eric Wimberger argued this step was made necessary by foul play in Green Bay in 2020. Faced with extraordinary demands to execute an election amid a raging pandemic, the Green Bay city council created an ad hoc elections committee, which agreed to take $1.6 million from the Center for Civic and Tech Life, and also invited the guidance of several outside experts who helped the city plan for and hold its general election that year.

Green Bay’s clerk, however, clashed with that outside aid and wound up resigning, arguing she’d been marginalized by city leaders who favored outside expertise over her own.

The election was carried out without any reported irregularities. In a report issued in April of 2021, Green Bay’s city attorney absolved the city of any wrongdoing in the administration of the 2020 election, and furthermore found that the outside aid was much-needed. The report details intense challenges in Green Bay leading up to the election, with city officials overwhelmed and ill-equipped. “There was no way for the City to react to the changes brought on by the pandemic without the infusion of funding,” the report stated.

Three years after that report, the Green Bay episode remains the subject of Republican conspiracy theories, and is a primary motivator for Question 2 supporters in the legislature. Wimberger, who represents Green Bay, alleged from the Senate floor that in 2020 “activists orchestrated the fall election and acted as a city clerk would act, though paid by [the Center for Civic and Tech Life], including managing staff and having access to ballots.” He went on to suggest that the outside aid made Wisconsin’s 2020 election results untrustworthy. “Whether the actual ballots were altered or advantages went to one side remains unclear,” he said. “Suspicions remain.”

During that same Senate debate, Democratic legislators argued that Wisconsin Republicans were putting the state in an impossible position by both declining to substantially increase funding for local elections and limiting the ability of local administrators to seek help.

“You can’t have it both ways,” Democratic Senator Mark Spreitzer said. “You can either provide public funding for elections, or you can let clerks go out and find the resources they need to cover the gap. But you can’t choose neither.”

Advocates told Bolts the vagueness of Question 2 in particular could prove to be a feature, not a bug, for Republicans: by creating new avenues to prosecute people in election administration, they create opportunities to sow distrust and chaos.

“This only plays into the narrative that our system is broken, by making it more broken,” Liebert said. 

That narrative has taken hold in prominent corners of Wisconsin politics. For one, court documents recently showed, lawyers in Wisconsin were central to Donald Trump’s effort to create a “cloud of confusion” in attempting to overturn election results in 2020. Since then, some law enforcement officials in Wisconsin have tried to use the powers of their office to investigate the elections, as Bolts has reported.

And election deniers continue to have sway in Wisconsin. A fake elector for Trump sits on the state’s election commission; another, Bill Feehan, is running for office in LaCrosse County in April. Trump supporters are also now trying to force a recall of Robin Vos, the staunchly conservative sitting Republican speaker of the Wisconsin House, over concerns Vos hadn’t done enough to help them decertify the state’s 2020 results. 

David Canon, professor emeritus of political science at the University of Wisconsin, joined several others interviewed for this story in predicting that the exact boundaries set by Question 2 will have to be clarified in court, should the amendment pass. He identified several types of routine elections work that could feature in lawsuits challenging election results.

For example, Canon said, “What about helping disabled voters? Under state law a disabled person can have someone take them to the polling place and be with them when they vote. I think there will be a lot of people in the gray area who will have to be sorted out by subsequent litigation.” 

This would all be avoided, of course, if Question 2 fails—but Wisconsin politicos told Bolts they’d be shocked by that outcome. In the absence of organized opposition, many of them said, the amendment should appeal to a wide swath of voters who take its language at face value and may miss the intentions of the measure’s authors. 

“You have some folks that were pushing both of these constitutional amendments that are looking to try and sow seeds of doubt on our elections,” he said. “There’s going to be a lot of throwing things at the wall to see what sticks, by folks who’ve been pushing to poke and prod, and who’ll poke and prod some more now.”

The post Ballot Measure May Scare Away the People Who Help Run Wisconsin Elections appeared first on Bolts.

—

Neil Makhija spent years promoting voter turnout in South Asian communities, and, as a professor of election law at the University of Pennsylvania, teaching new generations of attorneys about the fragility of the right to vote. But in 2020, he says, he felt frustrated watching the presidential race from the sidelines as then-President Donald Trump and his allies sought to invalidate lawful ballots and overturn election results with a barrage of failed lawsuits.

He decided to run for county commissioner in Montgomery County, a suburban area of 860,000 people northwest of Philadelphia. That board oversees more than half a billion dollars in annual spending across about 40 departments, but Makhija, a Democrat, says he was primarily motivated by one sliver of the body’s authority: setting rules for election administration. 

Having won his election last November, Makhija is now in a position to secure voting rights from the inside. County commissions in most of Pennsylvania double as boards of elections, with broad discretion over election procedures, handing Makhija power to help shape how voting is conducted in the third most populous county of this pivotal swing state. And he’s intent on getting creative.

Makhija tells Bolts he intends to propose that Montgomery County set up a mobile unit that’d go into neighborhoods to help people resolve mistakes they’ve made on their mail ballots.

He likens his proposal, which election experts say does not currently exist anywhere in Pennsylvania, to an ice cream truck for voting.

“Imagine if voting was as efficient and accessible as getting an Amazon delivery or calling an Uber,” Makhija told Bolts. “Exercising fundamental rights shouldn’t be more burdensome.”

His idea is to strengthen Montgomery County’s process for ballot curing, the process by which voters get to resolve minor errors on mail ballots to ensure they are counted. 

This is no abstract matter: Thousands of Pennsylvania mail ballots are tossed out every cycle due to any number of possible mistakes, including a missing or inaccurate date, a missing signature or one that doesn’t match the voter’s signature on file, or a so-called naked ballot returned with no secrecy envelope. These rejected ballots disproportionately come from older people and communities of color. 

Pennsylvania provides no statewide guidelines for how local boards are supposed to handle mail ballots with errors. Some counties don’t allow voters to make any corrections to their ballots once they’ve been cast; others let them address a missing date or mismatched signature, but do little to notify them of the issue, much less to facilitate a fix. 

Montgomery County is already more permissive than other parts of the state. Its elections office says it makes multiple attempts to contact anyone whose ballot is at risk of being rejected, offering them opportunities to come in and cure it, through phone calls, emails, and written letters. But even in Montgomery County the vast majority of mail ballots with mistakes are never counted. Francis Dean, the county’s director of elections, reports a roughly 10-percent cure rate; he says the county rejects at least 1,000 ballots every election cycle. 

Makhija wants his county to do a lot more to stand out: He’s making the case that Montgomery County should meet people where they actually live, taking on more of the administrative burden of ensuring that mail ballots are cast correctly. 

Under his proposed mobile program, county election workers would flag and set aside ballots that come in with mistakes. Then, over a roughly three-week period—the early-voting window leading up to Election Day—they’d bring those erroneous ballots directly to  voters, who could cure them on the spot without having to make their way to an election office. 

“The idea that a county official would know a ballot isn’t going to be counted, and sit on it for weeks—that, to me, feels like you’re depriving a voter of their right,” he told Bolts. “One of our obligations in government is to help people enforce their rights.” 

Voting rights advocates in Pennsylvania say Makhija’s proposal would be a game-changer, even within the cohort of counties already making relatively strong efforts to prevent ballots from being tossed for technical errors. 

“Ideally, we’d have that everywhere: very proactive election administrators doing everything they can to make sure people’s votes are counted,” said Philip Hensley-Robin, executive director of Common Cause Pennsylvania.

Makhija’s plan is an ambitious one, to be sure. The commissioner says he still has questions as to whether the county can unlock the resources to implement his vision. Dean, the elections director, who says he’s eager to work with Makhija on this, also says that it won’t be easy to reach hundreds of cure-eligible voters over a short period every election. Dean says he’s working to develop a cost estimate, and that even if the county is willing to pay for this project, it would also take a push to hire the workforce to carry it out. “Big ideas require an equally big commitment of resources,” he told Bolts. 

Already this year, Makhija has led the way on another change that will ensure fewer ballots are rejected. The board of elections voted Jan. 23 to accept ballots even when voters have written the wrong year, or no year at all, on the envelope. (Voters who make that error won’t even have to fix, or “cure,” their mistake to be counted.)

The board’s decision codified part of a federal ruling in late November; following a legal fight, the judge ordered elections officials throughout Pennsylvania to count mail ballots on which voters either forgot to write the date or wrote the wrong date. That ruling is still working its way through the court system, now in the hands of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit.

Montgomery County, more than most, understands how important the November ruling was: it changed the outcome of that month’s election in Towamencin Township, where Kofi Osei, a Democrat, was running to unseat Republican Rich Marino on the board of supervisors. 

Six Towamencin ballots with dating issues had been set aside before the court ruling, and those six broke five to one for Osei, erasing Marino’s four-vote lead and bringing the candidates to a tie. Per Pennsylvania’s bizarre rules to settle tied elections, Marino and Osei were each made to pick among a set of tiles numbered one through 30; the person who drew the lower number would win. Marino drew the number 28, and Osei drew 15.

Then, on Jan. 16 of this year, the county held a special election for a school district race. During the count, the county identified 75 voters who wrote no year on their ballot envelopes, or mistakenly wrote that the year was 2023; the Jan. 23 ordinance confirmed the county should count those ballots. The election was decided by more than 3,000 votes, so the 75 affected ballots didn’t determine the winner—but Osei’s earlier tiebreak victory reminds that 75 voters can be more than enough to tip a contest. 

Adam Bonin, a Democratic elections attorney who represented Osei in the last election, laments that these policies are left to local governments to decide. Two voters who live on either side of a county border, who cast mail ballots with the very same curable discrepancy, may be offered vastly different opportunities to fix them based on the inclinations of their local leaders. 

“It is incredibly unfortunate that we don’t have statewide standards on this,” Bonin told Bolts. “This isn’t about partisan results; this is about getting to every voter who is trying to vote, and giving them every chance for it to be lawful and get it counted.” 

He added, “I would beg of the counties: What can you do to empower your voters?” 

Democratic Governor Josh Shapiro’s administration late last year announced that the state would redesign its mail ballots with brighter colors and updated wording to minimize the possibility a voter makes a cure-worthy mistake. But with control of Pennsylvania state government split between Democrats and Republicans, advocates see little hope for a broader statewide fix this year to create uniform policy over the handling of ballots that are still erroneous. That means it will remain largely up to local politicians to set the tone in 2024. 

This patchwork can prove confusing to residents, but also to voting rights groups that need to stay on top of a tremendous amount of fragmented information to know what they can do in one place versus another. “You don’t always know what you’re getting from county to county, and folks who are not actively paying attention and abreast of the situation especially may not know,” said Kyle Miller, Pennsylvania policy strategist for the national nonprofit Protect Democracy. 

With exceptions, Democratic-run Pennsylvania counties have generally embraced more expansive rules on ballot curing, while GOP-run counties have tended to adopt more restrictive rules. Pennsylvania Republicans supported expanding mail voting five years ago, but mostly turned against it amid Trump’s false allegations of voter fraud.

Even Dauphin County (Harrisburg), which voted for President Biden by nine percentage points in 2020, has not offered ballot curing, as the idea was blocked by its then-GOP-controlled commission. The county flipped to Democrats in the fall of 2023 for the first time since at least the Civil War, and a new county commissioner told Bolts in November that he wants to advance reform this year. Democrats tend to also cast the majority of mail ballots in red-leaning places like York County that don’t enable curing, making them more vulnerable to having their ballots rejected.

But on the other end of the spectrum, counties that do allow ballot curing also differ vastly in how much they invest in making sure voters know about and can resolve ballot discrepancies. 

At least six Pennsylvania counties have published public lists with the names of people whose ballots are at risk of being rejected, enabling third-party groups to step in to help inform voters, according to a survey by Votebeat. Montgomery County does not publish such a list preemptively, but it does share the names of anyone whose ballot has been rejected with campaigns that ask, Makhija said.

That approach still puts the responsibility of outreach on outside organizations, and it still asks voters to find time to come into the elections office. Makhija wants to go further. “We should not be putting the burden on our residents,” he said. “We should be making it as easy as possible.”

He expects to formalize his proposal for mobile curing “in the coming weeks.” The board of elections is made up of the county’s three commissioners, with Makhija chairing it alongside Democrat Jamila Winder and Republican Tom DiBello. Winder, who is generally his ally on expanding voter access, did not respond to Bolts’ interview request. Last month, she issued a statement criticizing the practice of rejecting ballots because of “a simple mistake that we all have made at one point in our lives.”

If the board approves the program, Makhija says the county likely wouldn’t be able to implement mobile curing in time for the April 23 primary, but that he wants to make it happen by November.

Dean pointed to less ambitious things the county could do in the meantime. For one, he plans to seek county approval to open four more offices at which voters could cure their ballots. At the moment, this service is offered at only one location in the entire county, forcing some far-flung residents to drive more than 40 minutes to correct a ballot issue. 

He says he’s eager to think big and hopeful that Montgomery County can be an example for others in Pennsylvania. “I’m happy to be a part of a county that isn’t afraid to have those conversations,” he told Bolts. “The goal is to be setting the standard in Pennsylvania.”

The post How an ‘Ice Cream Truck’ for Voting Could Stop Pennsylvania Ballots from Being Tossed appeared first on Bolts.

After court rulings in December struck down several states’ electoral maps, from Michigan to New York, what districts will millions of people even vote in later this year? How prepared will local election offices be after suffering harassment for years? Will the Voting Rights Act (VRA) still stand as a tool for civil rights litigation in the wake of an ominous ruling that came in late 2023? Who will even be running elections in North Carolina and Wisconsin, two swing states that are experiencing an intense power struggle?

Our team at Bolts has identified a dozen key questions that will shape voting rights and democracy this year. This is born less of a desire to be comprehensive than to offer a preliminary roadmap for our own coverage.

That’s because, while some questions that matter to 2024 will come down to federal decisions—likely starting with decisions by the U.S. Supreme Court on Donald Trump’s prosecutions and presence on the ballot, and on the VRA’s fate—a lot will hinge on the policies and politics of state and local governments: your county clerk in charge of organizing Election Day, your county board that decides where to put ballot drop boxes, your lawmakers tweaking the rules of ballot initiatives, your secretary of state wielding the power to certify results. (Be sure to explore our state-by-state resources on who runs our elections and who counts our elections.) 

These are the officials we will be tracking throughout the year to help us clarify the local landscape of voting rights and access to democracy during a critical election year. 

1. How will federal courts affect voting rights and the 2024 election?

A maelstrom of major legal cases on voting rights and the 2024 election are currently working their way through the legal system, and many are heading straight toward the nation’s highest court.

The stakes are clear in: The U.S. Supreme Court

SCOTUS is set to hear several cases that will affect one presidential candidate: Donald Trump. The first is whether Trump will be allowed to appear on the ballot in several states. Colorado’s state supreme court disqualified him from the primary ballot in late December, ruling he was ineligible due to the Fourteenth Amendment because he engaged in an insurrection on January 6. (Maine’s secretary of state came to a similar conclusion one week later.) Trump has appealed the Colorado decision to the U.S. Supreme Court, though the justices have not yet announced whether and when they will hear the cases; their ruling is likely to also shape how other states do, amid the former president’s protests that his removal would unduly disenfranchise millions. The Supreme Court could also decide at least five other cases that touch Trump, including the shape of his Atlanta trial on charges that he tried to subvert the 2020 election in Georgia.

Also keep an eye on: SCOTUS may decide any major litigation that emerges in the aftermath of the November elections. But it’s also set to consider plenty of non-Trump voting rights cases this year, including several that may further gut the VRA. One devastating blow for the landmark civil rights law may come from a case out of Arkansas, where a federal appeals court ruled that private groups and individuals cannot bring VRA challenges. If the Supreme Court upholds this ruling, legal experts say it would make the law largely unenforceable. As the VRA continues to be weakened, some states have adopted state-level voting rights acts to reinforce its principles; debate may resume in Michigan and New Jersey this year over such legislation.

Federal appeals courts have also recently rejected other VRA claims, including in a case in which civil rights groups in Georgia challenged the state’s election system for its public utility commission as racially discriminatory. If the high court upholds the ruling, it would have major implications for the statewide elected utility commission in neighboring Alabama as well.

2. How will state election maps change by November?

Nearly four years after the decennial census that kicks off redistricting, election maps across the country remain in flux, and major legal and political battles are set to unfold this year. At stake is not just who will have power in each state, but also whether people get to vote under fair maps.

The stakes are clear in: Wisconsin

Wisconsin Republicans enjoy large legislative majorities that are effectively election-proof thanks to their gerrymandered maps, but 2023 began to unravel their hold on power. Liberals flipped the state’s supreme court in April after a heated campaign during which Janet Protasiewicz, the winning candidate, called the legislative maps “rigged.” And in late December, the court issued a 4-3 ruling, with liberals in the majority, striking down the legislative maps.

But there’s still a long way to go before voters can get fairer maps in November. The court set up a process to draw new remedial maps, but left the door open for lawmakers to try first. The state’s GOP speaker has largely backed off his earlier threats to impeach Protasiewicz but still has not ruled it out. And Democratic groups must decide whether they’ll also sue over the congressional map and whether to do so in state court.

Also keep an eye on: A federal judge ordered Louisiana to draw a new congressional map by late January to stop diluting the power of Black voters, but lawmakers may stall. Michigan needs to redraw its legislative maps after another federal ruling found that 13 districts violated the Voting Rights Act. New York is also in the midst of a fresh round of congressional redistricting after Democrats won a court battle in December, though it remains to be seen whether the process ends up producing minor tweaks or an aggressive Democratic gerrymander. And from Texas to Florida, there’s still active litigation in many states alleging that maps are unlawful. 

3. How well will local election officials and offices be prepared to handle the election?

The country’s elections workforce has been decimated in the past few years, amid a deluge of threats and harassment stemming from coordinated efforts by some Republicans to attack and undermine local and state administrators, as well as funding challenges. The capacity of these local offices will now be seriously tested in 2024. 

The stakes are clear in: Nevada

Nevada has suffered acutely since 2020 from election-worker brain-drain. Not a week into 2024, these woes have already deepened: Jamie Rodriguez, the elections chief in Washoe County (Reno), the second most populous county in the state, announced her resignation on Tuesday. Rodriguez’s predecessor, Deanna Spikula, herself stepped down in 2022 after some residents smeared her as a “traitor” and threatened her office. In an interview with Bolts last year, Cisco Aguilar, Nevada’s Democratic secretary of state, warned of where he sees this all heading: “If we don’t take care of the human component,” he said, “these elections are going to be nowhere near where we want them to be or expect them to be, and that’s only going to deteriorate the credibility of elections overall.”

Also keep an eye on: Election officials have similarly resigned en masse in recent years in many states, from Colorado to Pennsylvania, leading many to worry about the amount of experience lost. And while election workers are crucial, so is election infrastructure. Aging voting equipment presents a projected multi-billion-dollar problem. Look to Louisiana, for example, to see why this is worth worrying about: That state’s voting machines are nearly 20 years old. They break down often and, when they do, elections administrators struggle to obtain the parts to fix them. One local elections chief told Bolts her office is “barely hanging on”— a statement many of her counterparts around the country have echoed.

4. Who will actually run the 2024 elections?

It’s tough enough for election offices to prepare for the 2024 cycle amid all the personal overhaul they’ve experienced since 2024. But in some of the nation’s most important battleground states, election rules and administrators are in limbo going into this critical year. 

The stakes are clear in: Wisconsin

Wisconsin Election Commission administrator Meagan Wolfe became a target for right-wing conspiracists in the wake of the 2020 election, and GOP lawmakers resolved to oust her last year. After a complicated set of maneuvers, Senate Republicans voted to remove her from the position in September, but a judge later ruled that vote had no legal effect for now. Wolfe has not stepped down from her position even though her term has technically expired. This political and legal imbroglio has created huge uncertainty over who will actually administer Wisconsin’s elections this year. Adding to the limbo: Wisconsinites in April will elect some of the local officials who will then run the state’s August and November elections. 

Also keep an eye on: North Carolina Republicans were primed to oust the director of the state’s State Elections Board, Karen Brinson Bell, thanks to a new law they passed last year. The law changed the structure of the board so that it no longer has a Democratic majority, instead creating an even split between parties, and it entrusted the GOP legislature with resolving ties; this would likely set up Republicans to oust Bell and usher in new leadership. But a state court in late November blocked the law in a preliminary ruling, a legal dispute set to resolve this year. 

5. What happens if any election officials try to stall or halt certification?

After losing the 2020 presidential race, Donald Trump asked state and local officials to stall or stop the election’s certification, hoping to overturn state results and convince his congressional allies to accept his slates of fake electors. If Trump loses the presidential race again this fall and repeats that strategy, would he find allies who are willing to disrupt the process and have the authority to stop it? Be sure to bookmark our nationwide resource on who counts elections since answering this difficult question requires a keen understanding of the mechanisms of power in every state, which Bolts will track throughout 2024. 

The stakes are clear in: Michigan

The recent revelation by the Detroit News that Trump personally pressured members of the Wayne County (Detroit) Board of Canvassers in 2020 was no surprise given what was already known of his actions that year. But it was a reminder of the critical role these local bodies play in Michigan: Boards of canvassers are divided equally between parties, which leaves Democrats particularly vulnerable to shenanigans in a populous stronghold like Wayne. 

Since 2020, the Michigan GOP has replaced their local election officials with people who have defended subverting elections. Republicans on the statewide board of canvassers have also shown they’re willing to go along with such maneuvers. Still, Michigan has new legal standards clarifying that canvassers lack the discretion to reject valid results; in 2022, Democrats defended their majority on the state supreme court, the body that would be called on to enforce such standards.

Also keep an eye on: Election deniers lost most of their bids to take power in swing states in 2022, but there are plenty of other spots to watch. Officials with a history of delaying election certification won reelection last year in Pennsylvania, though Democrats solidified their hold on the state’s supreme court. Trump allies will run local election offices in swing states such as Arizona and Georgia, heightening the potential for havoc. And a fake Trump elector from 2020 has a seat on the Wisconsin Election Commission, the body that runs elections in a key battleground state.

6. How easy will it be for voters to vote by mail?

If you want to vote by mail in this year’s elections, will you need to provide an excuse to get an absentee ballot? Will you have easy access to a drop box to drop off your ballot? What are the odds your mail ballot gets tossed on a technicality? That all depends on your state, the bills your lawmakers are crafting, and may even hinge on the decisions of your local government. 

The stakes are clear in: Pennsylvania

Pennsylvania has one of the nation’s most decentralized systems when it comes to mail voting procedures. As Bolts reported this fall, county officials there have a startling amount of discretion on how to deal with deficient ballots, whether to install drop boxes, and even whether to have armed law enforcement guarding them. Democratic wins in November’s local elections are likely to preserve the status quo in the most populous counties. But democracy advocates are pushing for better procedures on how voters can fix mistakes, and more robust requirements for drop boxes; they’ll be waging this battle both statewide and county by county throughout 2024.

Also keep an eye on: Since the 2020 presidential race saw an explosion of mail voting during the pandemic, many states have revised their rules—some to make it harder, others to expand its availability. The 2024 cycle will be the biggest test yet for how these laws impact turnout. For instance, Democrats in Michigan this year passed new laws that make it easier to vote by mail and set new requirements for drop boxes. Inversely, Georgia Republicans’ restrictions on mail voting, adopted in 2021, just survived their latest court challenge in October. In Mississippi, a new state law that criminalizes helping people with absentee voting is currently blocked by a federal court ruling. Meanwhile in Wisconsin, Democrats are hoping that their new majority on the state supreme court enables voters to use ballot drop boxes, a practice the state disallowed in 2022.

7. Will more states ease voter registration?

By requiring citizens to register to vote, states have erected a barrier between voters and the act of voting. But some have pushed boundaries in recent years, finding ways of shifting the burden of registration onto the state or eliminating unnecessary deadlines or paperwork, with some proposals questioning whether we need registration at all. This will be another critical year to watch how states ease or curtail access to this fundamental right.

The stakes are clear in: New Jersey

Almost half of states allow voters to register on the day of an election—a major convenience for any of the countless people in those states who may otherwise have missed a deadline. Liberal as it is, New Jersey is not among the states with this option, mainly because of opposition from its Democratic state Senate president. The state is weighing the policy afresh this year.

Also keep an eye on: Oregon and Colorado have been badgering the Biden administration for years to allow states to automatically register people to vote when they sign-up for Medicaid; if the feds acted on this,  hundreds of thousands of people would be registered to vote. Other states are considering new laws that would set up or expand automatic voter registration, including applying it to new state agencies, including Ohio, where organizers are pushing for a November initiative; and California, where proposed legislation would likely end up with more people on voter rolls; as well as Maryland and New Jersey, where progressives hope to copy Michigan’s recent first-in-the-nation move to automatically register people to vote as they exit prison.

8. How will states keep changing felony disenfranchisement laws? 

Each state sets its own laws governing whether—and to what extent—people with previous felony convictions lose voting rights, and the national landscape on this front is ever-changing; 2023 alone saw landmark voting rights restoration in New Mexico and Minnesota, plus dramatic rollbacks in Virginia and Tennessee. The United States has long stood out among democracies worldwide for how aggressively it denies voting rights to people with criminal records, and that won’t change in 2024: an estimated 4 million citizens will be blocked from the ballot, but upcoming legal cases and political decisions could affect that number.

The stakes are clear in: Mississippi

A panel of judges on the federal Fifth Circuit appeals court issued a shock decision last summer that struck down Mississippi’s extraordinarily harsh disenfranchisement rules, which strip hundreds of thousands of people of their voting rights for life. (An estimated 11 percent of the state’s adult population can’t vote, currently a national record.) But when the state appealed that panel ruling, the full Fifth Circuit agreed to reconsider it, voiding the prior decision and setting up a major legal showdown this year. If plaintiffs win again, it would bring about one of the most significant expansions of the franchise in a given state in recent history. But don’t bank on that, as voting rights advocates have been bracing for defeat.

The stakes are also clear in: Virginia

Virginia Democrats have been sharply critical of Republican Governor Glenn Youngkin’s 2023 decision to reverse his predecessors’ policy of automatically restoring people’s voting rights. Having just seized control of the legislature, they say they’ll now look to bypass Youngkin by referring to voters a constitutional amendment to remove rights restoration power from the governor’s office. That process would take multiple years to reach the ballot, though.

Also keep an eye on: Progressives in California, Massachusetts, and Oregon hope to go further and altogether eliminate felony disenfranchisement this session, enabling anyone to vote from prison. (This is already law in Maine, Vermont, Puerto Rico, and Washington, D.C.). Inversely, Tennessee stepped up restrictions on rights restoration in 2023, and now requires people to pay new application fees; 2024 will be the new system’s first major test.

9. Will sheriffs, prosecutors and other law enforcement officials step up policing and intimidation around elections?  

Trump’s lies about the 2020 election inspired right-wing officials across the country to launch special law enforcement units to root out and punish election crimes. They also fueled crackdowns in states where GOP officials had spread the myth of widespread voter fraud long before Trump, leading to a raft of laws creating new election-related crimes or increasing existing penalties around voting. Some GOP law enforcement officials have partnered with far-right election denier groups that are ramping up their own efforts to police voting ahead of Trump’s attempt at re-election. 

The stakes are clear in: Texas

Bolts reported last year that the elected sheriff and DA in Texas’ Tarrant County, home to Fort Worth, were launching a new law enforcement task force to investigate and prosecute voter fraud. Phil Sorrells, the DA, ran with Trump’s endorsement in 2022 and won on promises to ratchet up policing of elections. The sheriff, Bill Waybourn, has become a right-wing celebrity for his fealty to Trump while also facing mounting criticism at home for a spike in deaths and other scandals at the county jail he oversees. 

Political pressure over baseless claims of fraud have already disrupted the running of elections in Fort Worth; Tarrant County’s widely respected elections chief stepped down last year after months of harassment from election deniers, which included racist attacks about his heritage. And election deniers have claimed without evidence that Waybourn’s close reelection win in 2020 suggests there was fraud. (Waybourn is up for reelection again this year.) That all sets the stage for even more allegations and investigations in a county with a long history of harsh and questionable prosecutions for voter fraud during a critical election year.

Also keep an eye on:  Florida Governor Ron DeSantis in 2022 established the country’s first statewide agency dedicated solely to investigating election crimes, which quickly resulted in a series of arrests of people with prior felony convictions accused of voting illegally—many of whom have said the government had told them they could vote and whose prosecutions have since fizzled. Bolts has also reported how sheriffs in the swing states of Arizona and Wisconsin have bolstered election conspiracies and partnered with leading purveyors of election conspiracies to increase policing of elections. 

10. Where, and how, will the assault on direct democracy continue?

Many Republican-run states have curtailed the ballot initiative process in recent years, looking to limit citizens’ ability to put new issues on the ballot. After the GOP failed to derail an abortion rights initiative in Ohio in August, Bolts hosted a roundtable with democracy organizers who all said they expected the assault on direct democracy to continue unabated in 2024, fueled by conservative efforts to protect abortion bans and fight off redistricting reforms.

The stakes are clear in: Missouri

Reproductive rights advocates have turned to the only tool at their disposal in red states: directly asking voters to protect abortion rights. In Missouri, organizers have already had to fight off their attorney general’s effort to sabotage such a measure. In 2024, they’ll also have to contend with GOP proposals to change the rules and make it harder for voters to approve initiatives. One bill, filed by a GOP lawmaker for the 2024 session, would create a new requirement for initiatives to receive a majority in half of the state’s congressional districts in order to pass. Because the state’s map is gerrymandered to favor Republicans, this would force a progressive ballot initiative to carry at least one district that’s far more conservative than the state at large—a tall order for the abortion rights measure to meet. 

Also keep an eye on: Republicans are eying changes to state law in other states like Oklahoma to block abortion rights measures. In Arkansas, where the GOP passed a law last year that made it much more difficult to get a measure on the ballot, the coming year will test what space the law has left for organizing efforts. And democracy advocates in Idaho and Ohio expect Republicans to look for new maneuvers to restrict the initiative process.

11. What will happen to DAs and judges targeted for removal in southern states? 

Conservative officials in southern states have in recent years created, expanded, or ratcheted up the use of state powers to oust local DAs who make policies they disagree with—such as declining certain low-level charges or ruling out abortion prosecution. They have also targeted high-court judges over their decisions and statements.

States to watch: Georgia and Texas 

Republican anger toward local prosecutors reached a fever pitch in Georgia last year with Fulton County DA Fani Willis’ decision to investigate and ultimately prosecute Trump for his efforts to overturn the 2020 presidential election. As Bolts reported, Georgia Republicans established a new board with authority to oust DAs over their charging decisions, though the law has so far been tied up in court. Similarly, after the Supreme Court’s Dobbs decision triggered a near total criminal abortion ban in Texas, GOP lawmakers there pushed through legislation expanding powers to oust local DAs who said they would refuse to prosecute abortion and other cases, a law that may be turned against some local officials this year. 

Also keep an eye on: Florida, where the governor has broad power to remove and replace local elected officials, DeSantis has ousted two local prosecutors over the past two years, and voters will get to weigh in on who should occupy those offices for the first time since. Residents of St. Louis will also vote for the first time since the removal of their elected prosecutor by the Republicans in the Missouri state government. And Tennessee Republicans have stepped up efforts to sideline Memphis’ new Democratic DA. There are similar efforts to target judges, like the only Black woman justice on North Carolina’s supreme court, for removal. 

12. How will localities innovate to boost participation in democracy and local elections?  

Even as some places tried to make voting more difficult, 2023 also saw many states and cities experiment with new strategies to expand the franchise and encourage more participation in democracy. This year’s elections will see some of the first fruits of those efforts, as well as other places possibly following suit. 

The stakes are clear in: Municipalities experimenting with noncitizen voting

Boston’s city council in December passed an ordinance to allow noncitizens with legal status to vote in local elections, a landmark win for progressives who’ve championed this issue locally for years, as Bolts reported in 2022. But the Massachusetts legislature would need to authorize Boston’s reform, which may come to a head this year. Boston’s move comes as other cities have adopted noncitizen voting. Last year, Burlington became the latest Vermont locality to allow noncitizen voting in local elections, giving more members of the state’s growing immigrant communities a say in things like school boards and municipal budgets. Washington, D.C. passed a similar ordinance last year, though a lawsuit was filed last year challenging the measure, a battle likely to continue into this year.

Also keep an eye on: Other innovations to increase participation are set to take effect this year, and will face their first tests. Michigan allowed 16 and 17-year-olds to pre-register to vote before their 18th birthday,  while New York passed a law requiring high schools to distribute registration and pre-registration forms to students. Colorado and Nevada recently expanded voting access on Tribal lands. New York also just moved some local elections to even years to boost turnout, a reform that may inspire proposals in other states on an issue that is gaining steam around the nation.

Correction: The article has been corrected to reflect where Trump appealed his disqualification from the Maine ballot.

The post Twelve Questions Shaping Democracy and Voting Rights in 2024 appeared first on Bolts.