“I’m in support of any measures that make the process more fair to reflect the will of the people, instead of letting the politicians decide how to gerrymander,” says Kwon.

In the voting booth, he reviewed the text in front of him. His ballot read that voting ‘yes’ would set up a panel “required to gerrymander the boundaries of state legislative and congressional districts,” and that it would “repeal constitutional protections against gerrymandering.” 

So Kwon voted ‘no’ on the measure—given what he’d just read, he thought, that had to be the way to signal support for independent redistricting. He’d gone in planning to vote ‘yes,’ but he was thrown off by this language he saw; he guessed that he must have been wrong or missed some recent development. “The language seemed really specific that if you vote ‘yes’, you’re for gerrymandering,” he now recalls in frustration. 

But when he left the polling station and compared notes with his wife, he quickly figured out that he’d made a mistake: He had just voted to preserve the status quo. To bring about the new independent process and remove redistricting from elected officials, as was his intention, he would have had to vote ‘yes.’

Kwon says he got confused by the language that was crafted and placed on the ballot by Republican Ohio officials. The official most directly responsible for this language, Secretary of State Frank LaRose, had a direct hand in drawing the gerrymandered maps that Kwon opposes and that the reform would unwind.

“I didn’t think that they would go so far as to just straight up lie and use a word that means one thing to describe something else,” Kwon told me. “They are using the term gerrymandering to describe an attempt to actually fix the gerrymandering.”

He added, “I thought this was a serious document, and that there would be some standard.” Other Ohioans have come forward with similar stories in recent days, complaining they meant to vote ‘yes’ but got tricked by the ballot language into not doing so.

Now the fate of Ohio’s redistricting reform hinges on whether its proponents can dispel this confusion and get the word out to all the residents who intend to support it. 

The result will determine who gets to draw future state congressional and legislative districts, and it may shift seats as early as 2026. But more than that, the dispute adds to a larger saga over the viability of direct democracy in Ohio. Just last summer, the GOP pushed an amendment that would have made it much less likely for future citizen-initiated measures to succeed. That proposal failed, but Mia Lewis, associate director of Common Cause Ohio, told me at the time that she expected Republican leaders to “come back and try again” this year. Now she says that’s exactly what they did when they skewed this latest measure’s ballot language. 

Lewis helped organize Issue 1 this year. And just like in the summer of 2023, she said, state officials “are threatened by the idea that the people of Ohio would have power.”

“They have understood that Ohioans don’t want gerrymandering, they have nothing good to say about voting ‘no’,” she said, “so the only thing they can say is, if you vote ‘yes,’ on this, you’re requiring gerrymandering, which is the exact opposite of the truth.”

Issue 1 would amend the state constitution to create a new panel to draw Ohio districts. It would be made up of 15 citizens selected by retired judges from a pool of applicants; the body would need to include five registered Republicans, five registered Democrats, and five people who are neither. Elected officials would be barred from serving on the commission. 

An independent commission would mark a huge change from current law, which grants the authority to draw districts to a panel of elected officials, including the governor, the secretary of state, and appointees of legislative leaders. The constitution already requires that new maps respect certain principles of fairness. But when Ohio’s high court in 2022 struck down GOP gerrymanders seven separate times, ordering the process to be more equitable, GOP leaders ignored the rulings and ran out the clock until they landed a more conservative court in the 2022 midterms. Issue 1 would also codify more stringent fairness criteria for the new commission to respect. 

The coalition that drafted Issue 1 collected enough signatures to put it on the ballot. But as the secretary of state, LaRose got the opportunity to write the measure’s official summary. LaRose had been an active player in the redistricting process that drew the current maps that favor the GOP, but wrote his proposed summary in a way that suggested Issue 1 would make it likelier that Ohio gets gerrymandered. Proponents of Issue 1 immediately complained that his text was misleading. 

They got more angry after LaRose’s draft went up for review in front of the Ohio Ballot Board, a five-person body that includes LaRose and has a GOP majority. During that process, Republican state Senator and board member Theresa Gavarone proposed the specific wording that Kwon says tripped him up most: She suggested using the term “gerrymander” to describe the way Issue 1 would require a commission to divide up the state.

Gavarone’s proposed tweak was met by gasps and startled laughter from the audience. (This can be heard in the recording’s 1:35:20 mark.) State Representative Terrence Upchurch, one of two Democrats on the board, then laughed in bewilderment when given the opportunity to respond to Gavarone. Still, a majority of the board approved LaRose’s draft and Gavarone’s amendment.

Voting rights groups rushed to court, asking for the language to be struck down. But the state supreme court, which has a narrow GOP majority, rebuffed them in September and upheld most of the ballot summary. 

The four Republican justices said it was accurate to say that the new independent commission would “gerrymander” Ohio since it would be tasked with taking partisanship into account, even if it’s to draw a more evenly divided map.

The three Democratic justices disagreed furiously. Justice Jennifer Brunner wrote in a dissent, “We should be requiring a nearly complete redrafting of what is perhaps the most stunningly stilted ballot language that Ohio voters will have ever seen.”

According to Derek Clinger, an Ohio-based lawyer who has litigated past ballot language cases in front of the Ohio Supreme Court, many states use a system like Ohio’s: They ask elected partisan officials to draft ballot summaries. Still, some do it differently. Oregon, for instance, randomly selects citizens to meet and write statements summarizing each ballot measure. 

But what frustrates Clinger is that Ohio’s state constitution does contain “workable standards” that are meant to enable oversight onto the decisions made by state officials; it states that language on the ballot can’t “mislead, deceive, or defraud the voters.” Clinger said, “You have this standard, but you had a majority [on the state supreme court] that disregarded that.”

Some Ohio justices take the view that they’re not supposed to play a strong oversight role. Pat DeWine, a Republican justice who is also the son of Ohio’s governor, even has a forthcoming law review essay on the matter. DeWine admits that the Ohio Ballot Board “is composed of partisan actors who may have incentives to draft language that at least subtly favors one side or the other.” But the court should be wary of second guessing them, he writes: It “polices only the outer boundaries of the board’s discretion.” 

Clinger, who now works at the State Democracy Research Initiative, a research hub at the University of Wisconsin Law School, disagrees. He points to a separate dispute that unfolded in Utah this fall: There, Republicans advanced a referendum meant to allow lawmakers to more easily overturn citizen-initiated measures, while also crafting ballot language claiming that their proposal would “strengthen the initiative process.” 

The Utah supreme court voided this measure in September, writing that a referendum must be placed “on the ballot in such words and in such form that the voters are not confused thereby.”

“Despite the partisan implications of the case, the Utah Supreme Court seemed able to assess in good faith whether the ballot language fairly described the proposal,” Clinger said. “The big takeaway for me is that the personnel of the court is so important.”

The composition of Ohio’s supreme court is on the line this fall since the state is holding elections for three of its seven seats. The GOP could expand its majority from 4-3 to 6-1, but Democrats also have an opportunity to flip the court in their favor. 

Neither Gavarone nor LaRose responded to Bolts’ requests for comment for this story. LaRose said in a statement last month that the court’s decision was “a huge win for Ohio voters, who deserve an honest explanation of what they’re being asked to decide.” 

If Issue 1 passes, the state would have to quickly set up a new commission to create new maps by the 2026 midterms. But for now, proponents of the reform are focused on getting the measure across the finish line. 

 A poll conducted this month by YouGov found that support for Issue 1 had a large lead of over 20 percentage points. But the survey did not use the actual language that people are seeing on their ballot; instead, it asked how respondents would vote after telling them that “a ‘yes’ vote would establish a new bipartisan redistricting commission” and “ban partisan gerrymandering.” That’s precisely the explanation that proponents are fretting won’t be on the measure.

“I’m not going to rest easy at all until election results have come in,” Lewis said. She says she is worried about “a lot of confusion and purposeful misinformation” during the campaign, like the incorrect claims by GOP opponents of the measure that law enforcement officers and veterans would not be eligible to be on the redistricting commission, for instance. 

Citizens Not Politicians, the committee running the “yes” campaign, is working to reach voters and explain what the measure actually does. The group launched an ad this fall in which former Chief Justice Maureen O’Connor tells voters that politicians opposed to Issue 1 have “lied” to them. O’Connor, a Republican, voted to strike down GOP gerrymanders in 2022; since leaving office two years ago, she has helped champion Issue 1. 

The committee behind the “no” campaign, Ohio Works, is running ads as well. They have used the same strategy as the Ohio Ballot Board, of trying to associate Issue 1 with gerrymandering. In response to the criticism that some voters feel tricked by this characterization, a spokesperson for Ohio Works has said that, “If people go in and intend to vote for Issue 1, read the ballot language and vote no, they are not confused.” 

But Kwon, the comic book writer, gives this warning to other Ohio voters: “Be careful. When you read the description, they’re going to refer to any attempt to change the current districting as gerrymandering. That’s what really threw me.”

“I would just say that, if you’re voting ‘yes,’ you’re voting to reform the current districting system,” he added.

Kwon feels frustrated that he unintentionally undercut a reform he supports and canceled out his wife’s vote. But together they’ve been burning up their friend network ever since to share word of his misfortune. 

He said, “If me sharing the story prevents somebody from getting tricked like I was, or one or two people from getting tricked, hopefully that will balance it out.”

The post Anti-Gerrymandering Groups Warn That Ohio’s Ballot Language Is Misleading Voters  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.

The moderator of an April candidate forum hosted by the City Club of Central Oregon wanted to know: Could the Republicans running for secretary of state confirm that, if elected, they’d certify the results of Oregon elections, even when their preferred candidates lose?

That would depend, candidate Dennis Linthicum responded. He’d first want to check with citizen activists.

“No detective will ever find a body in the backyard if he doesn’t look,” said Linthicum, who is currently a state senator representing a district in south central Oregon. “So, at some point, the public is the best lookers we have. They’re out there, they’re investigating. You’ve got people doing the math. You’ve got people chasing ballots and understanding how ballot harvesting has been harming the public.”

At no point in the forum did Linthicum provide evidence of widespread voter fraud in Oregon—there isn’t any—but that has never stopped him. He is part of a nationwide network of conservative officials and cultural influencers who have stoked election-related conspiracies for years now. Three years ago, he joined lawmakers from around the country in calling for an audit of the 2020 presidential election in all 50 states based on unspecified “fraud and irregularities.” 

Linthicum last week easily captured the GOP nomination to be secretary of state, Oregon’s top elections official. The office oversees voter registration and voting procedures, and is also charged with certifying election results.

In November, he’ll face Democrat Tobias Read, currently Oregon’s treasurer, who won his own contested primary last week. (The sitting secretary of state is not running.) Read is the clear favorite in this blue-leaning state, which hasn’t elected a Republican in any statewide race since the secretary of state election in 2016.

Mirroring many of the conspiracy theories pushed by allies of Donald Trump since his loss in the 2020 presidential race, Linthicum traces his unfounded claims to mail voting. He’s running on a platform of eliminating vote by mail, and forcing people to only vote in-person.

“There’s a giant chain of custody problem that’s associated with mail-in ballots,” he said at the April forum. “Balloting by ID, in a local precinct, where it can be managed by locals within the community, is the appropriate way to go.”

This change would end a system that Oregon pioneered a quarter-century ago, and one that has both boosted turnout in the state and inspired a policy shift in many other parts of the country. ​​Oregon first allowed mail ballots in 1987, and in the 1990s it became the first state to adopt universal mail voting, meaning that every registered voter got a ballot in the mail. Today, most states allow any eligible voter to vote by mail. Eight states have universal mail voting. 

Read, the Democrat, told Bolts he’ll work to protect the system if elected. “Oregonians are rightly proud of our long tradition of vote-by-mail elections,” he said. “I will look to strengthen it by making it more transparent and accessible, and protect it from cynical efforts to undermine our elections.”

Bolts reported in April that Read was running on incremental changes that would make it easier for people to vote. For example, he wants to set up a system that would send voters digital notifications of the status of their mail ballot so that they can follow it and feel confident it counted.

Voting by mail has grown to be very popular in Oregon, to the point that only a slim minority of people there vote in person anymore. Paul Gronke, who has been conducting public opinion research on this topic for nearly a decade, told Bolts that prior to Trump, voting by mail was “really overwhelmingly supported” in Oregon, among Republicans and Democrats alike.

“There were really very few questions,” said Gronke, a professor at Reed College and director of the Portland-based Elections & Voting Information Center. “Everybody loved it because we’d really adapted to it.”

But many conservatives soured on mail voting starting in 2020, and circulated widely debunked conspiracies that it enabled mass fraud. GOP-run states adopted new restrictions on mail voting and ballot drop boxes, which are used to collect mail ballots. No state has outright banned mail voting nor has any state with universal mail voting rolled that back, including conservative Utah. 

The unfounded claims about mail voting have resonated in parts of Oregon—the May 21 primary saw some protesters gather in Bend to demand an end to mail voting, for instance—even if the state was not competitive in 2020. 

Linthicum has had a hand in that. Alongside some conservative allies, the lawmaker filed a lawsuit in 2022 looking to strike down Oregon’s vote-by-mail system. 

The lawsuit alleged that mail voting is so unsafe and opaque that its availability violates citizens’ civil rights under the U.S. Constitution. It asked the courts to end mail voting altogether in Oregon, even as it contained no proof about issues with mail voting in Oregon. Relying largely on the debunked conspiracist documentary 2,000 Mules, it argued that “organized criminal” officials may be covering up fraud, and that the public cannot know “whether our elections are indeed safe.”

That suit was dismissed by a federal judge last year, and the U.S. Supreme Court last week declined to take up the case.

Linthicum has still repeated his claims against mail voting on the campaign trail. “Today, people, not necessarily citizens, can vote using a centralized non-transparent black box using mail-in ballots with nothing but a signature to validate the authenticity of the vote,” he wrote in a campaign newsletter in January. (Noncitizens are barred from voting in federal elections everywhere, and studies show these laws are not broken at any significant scale, but Republican politicians have increasingly spread false information on the issue.) 

Linthicum did not respond to multiple requests for comment for this story. 

As secretary of state, he would be limited in his ability to force the reforms he envisions. 

The daily tasks of Oregon election administration are handled by county-level officials. The secretary of state acts largely as a coordinator, and has no unilateral power to make significant changes to the election system. That work mainly falls to the state legislature, and if he wins in November, Linthicum would very likely have to contend with a statehouse controlled by Democrats, who strongly support mail voting. (Oregon voters are also electing the entire state House, and half of the state Senate, this fall. Democratic governor Tina Kotek, who won by just three percentage points in 2022, is not up for election until 2026.) 

The secretary of state may be involved in future litigation around mail voting. The office was named as a defendant in the lawsuit filed by Linthicum and others in 2022, and the state defended the system’s constitutionality. The secretary of state’s responsibility to certify election results may also prompt some chaos if Linthicum wins, given his hints that he could look to stall the process. 

In other contexts in which election deniers have refused to certify elections, courts have stepped in, and here, too, Oregon’s liberal supreme court looms as a backstop. But Trump allies have theorized that creating a “cloud of confusion” around results can gain them an advantage.

Election observers also commonly warn that individuals gaining a platform to spread false narratives about election integrity has an insidious effect on people’s confidence in democracy. 

“The challenge our system faces in the U.S. is not the reality of election fraud, or weakened election integrity, but the belief that voters have,” said Gronke, the professor and researcher. 

He added, of Linthicum, “Having someone with the bully pulpit like that can exacerbate that level of distrust.” 

While calling on conservative activists to help prove election fraud, Linthicum has also directly embedded himself within that corps. He was the only sitting elected official to put their name on the lawsuit against vote-by-mail, joining a group of plaintiffs that included advocates with the conservative citizen organization Free Oregon and the Election Integrity Committee of the state Republican Party. 

Linthicum has found other allies within the halls of power in some of his endeavors. Two Oregon lawmakers, state Senator Kim Thatcher and state Representative Lily Morgan, joined him in signing the 2021 letter demanding an audit of all states’ presidential results. 

Linthicum’s opposition to his state’s government has led him to champion the efforts of some in rural Oregon counties to secede from the state. He filed legislation seeking to force the state to open discussion on a far-fetched plan to join eastern Oregon with Idaho. Thirteen counties have approved advisory local measures to signal support for secession, including Klamath County, where Linthicum lives. 

Linthicum’s bid for higher office comes after a tense 2023 legislative session that saw him and nine other Republican state senators stage an extended statehouse walkout in protest of Democratic legislation on abortion, gun rights, and transgender health care. Voters in 2022 had passed a ballot measure to punish absenteeism among lawmakers, and the state supreme court confirmed in March that Linthicum was barred from seeking reelection as a result. 

Democrats have used their authority in Salem over the last decade to pass a string of reforms to make democracy more inclusive, extending beyond just mail voting. Perhaps most significantly, the state was the first in the country to adopt an automatic voter registration program for eligible voters, and is now among a handful of states pushing the federal government to let that program grow even further. 

Read, who is now running to keep Democrats in control of the secretary of state’s office, says he wants to build on that work, proposing tweaks but no big overhaul, Bolts reported last month.

“Any effort to make it easier for people to vote, to remove barriers, is a good thing,” Read said.

Phil Keisling, who helped champion the creation of universal mail voting as secretary of state in the 1990s, noted that this issue has long been partisan. Initially, he told Bolts, it was Oregon Republicans who pushed to codify universal mail voting in state law, and Democrats, including Keisling at first, who resisted the idea. “Heck, I voted against it. I didn’t know anything about it,” he said. By the mid-90s, he was sold, but, he added, “I was spending most of my time trying to convince Democrats this wasn’t a nefarious Republican plot.”

Keisling, who now advocates for this reform nationwide as chair of the National Vote At Home Institute, said that the program over time became very normalized in Oregon. Of Linthicum’s call to eliminate mail voting, he said, “I think it’s an issue the majority of Oregonians are going to pretty soundly reject.”

“If you ask most in the state what they think of mail voting,” he said, “their response will be, ‘Don’t you dare take it away, we love it.’”

The post The Republican Nominee to Lead Oregon Elections Wants to Stop All Mail Voting appeared first on Bolts.

“I never once saw a piece of paper, or a sign,” Pickens told Bolts. Sometimes he’d talk about the election with others detained alongside him, he said, but though adults held in Oregon jails are technically eligible to vote, “nobody else had any idea of how to get it done.”

Pickens was later convicted and transferred to the state prison system. His two-decade term there coincided with yet another major reform to election administration in Oregon: In 2015, the state kickstarted what would become a nationwide shift to automatic voter registration. But this move to make elections more inclusive again did not touch Pickens; like other Oregonians in prison over a felony, he’d lost his right to vote. 

Pickens regained that right when he was released but he was dismayed to find that formerly incarcerated people he encountered rarely knew that they also could vote. In 2022, his first full year out of prison, Oregon led the country in voter turnout. It didn’t feel that way in his circles.

“The lack of education is extensive,” Pickens said. “The people who have the knowledge and the power about voting really aren’t making it as available as they could.”

Pickens’ friend Sterling Cunio, who was detained at the same prison and also let out in 2021, echoed that sentiment, telling Bolts, “When we were inside, the only way we knew that we had our rights restored once we got out is because the prisoner population was educating each other.” Young adults, people living in poverty, and Native Americans, among other groups, also experience lower turnout and less access. “Oregon can say, ‘Hey, yeah, everything is great,’ but I want to see effort to engage, to educate all underserved populations in voting,” Cunio said. 

Even a state with a reputation for generally excellent voter services always has room to improve, their testimonials stressed. 

That is not lost on the leading Democratic candidates to be Oregon’s next chief elections official. 

James Manning, a state senator, and Tobias Read, Oregon’s treasurer and a 2022 candidate for governor, each told Bolts that they believe the state can do more to encourage participation and broaden voter access.

But they also offered different priorities and visions for what needs fixing. In his interview with Bolts, Manning emphasized the urgency of reversing the restrictions and structural neglect that keep some at the margins, including by ending the ban on people voting from prison. He talks of lingering exclusions as stains on democracy, stemming from a history of racism that Oregon should immediately confront.

Read feels the state should focus on fine-tuning the mechanics of Oregon’s existing systems before considering an idea, like voting from prison, that may be more divisive. His priorities, he said, include ironing out Oregon’s universal mail voting and automatic registration laws to address ways in which they may be tripping up the people that they’re meant to help.

Read, who has a fundraising lead and more endorsements from the state’s Democratic establishment, will face Manning in the May 21 Democratic primary. Also in the running are James Crary, Paul Damian Wells, and Dave Stauffer, candidates who have never held state-level office and have raised almost no money. 

The Democratic nominee will move on to face the winner of a three-way Republican contest in November. Oregon rarely elects Republicans in statewide races, though general elections are often competitive. The victor will replace LaVonne Griffin-Valade, who came into the role last summer after Democrat Shemia Fagan resigned in scandal. Griffin-Valade is not seeking a full term.

The next secretary of state will inherit a vast bureaucracy with which to tackle stubborn participation gaps. They’ll have a significant bully pulpit from which to push for change. 

They’ll also be first in line to replace the governor in the event of a vacancy. That’s how Kate Brown, who served as secretary of state from 2009 to 2015, entered the governor’s mansion in 2015; her predecessor there, John Kitzhaber, resigned—also in scandal—just a month into his fourth term. 

Recalling her own work laying the foundation for automatic voter registration, a program she backed as secretary of state and then signed into law as governor, Brown told Bolts via email, “the next Secretary is going to have to be willing to take risks, innovative, and strategic.”

“What actions can the Secretary take that will create the greatest amount of good (in this case access) for the most number of folks?” added Brown, who has not endorsed in this race.

Manning says the work of strengthening democracy is something he takes “personally.” The lawmaker, who is Black, told Bolts, “Let’s go back over history. We know during Jim Crow and even before that, people that look like me had to fight for the right to vote.”

Since joining the Senate in 2016, Manning has sponsored a bevy of legislation to grow the state’s voter rolls, often tailoring bills to groups that are less likely to be registered—if not explicitly barred. 

Last year, he sponsored a bill to expand the scope of the state’s automatic voter registration program. As adopted in 2015, the program applies to people who are getting or renewing a driver’s license; it left out people who don’t interact with the state’s DMV. The reform he carried, which became law last year but cannot be implemented without the federal government’s approval, would automatically register people when they interact with Medicaid offices. 

State data indicate that 85 percent of eligible residents who are unregistered to vote are Medicaid recipients, meaning that they are necessarily among the poorest people in Oregon. 

Manning this year unsuccessfully pushed separate legislation to implement automatic voter registration on college campuses. In 2019, he sponsored a successful effort to have Oregon cover the cost of postage on mail ballots. 

He is also a rare politician who has made it a cause to give the right to vote to any citizens regardless of a criminal conviction, including while they’re incarcerated. He’s a lead sponsor of legislation to enfranchise state prisoners. In the U.S., only Maine, Puerto Rico, Vermont, and Washington, D.C., allow everyone to vote from prison, though this is more common in other countries. 

“I think that every American, regardless of if they have been rehabilitated or if they are serving time, still are American citizens,” he said. “Democracy is something we should all engage in, and we have to allow people to participate.”

It’s a change Manning says can’t come soon enough: “At some point we are going to deal with the inhumanity of all of these years of what incarceration has cost us,” he said.

But the legislation on voting from prison has repeatedly fizzled at the committee stage. Some fellow Democrats have sided with Republicans to say that it goes too far, too quickly, and could cost too much money to implement. 

Read, Manning’s opponent in May, is among those Democrats who believe Oregon should not at this time consider restoring voting rights to people in prison. He told Bolts that he isn’t convinced that people convicted of certain crimes deserve to vote. “Does someone who’s convicted of identity theft get treated the same as another crime? Someone who is convicted of murder? I think the nature of the crime might be part of the conversation,” he said.

In any event, Read continued, now is not the right time to have that conversation. Instead, he said, the state should focus on activating people whose rights are already restored, pointing to persistently low outreach and participation among people with past convictions; this is a widespread problem around the country, as Bolts has reported in Kentucky and Michigan.

“I think there is still quite a lot of work to do to make sure that people who are coming back into society know about their rights and are using them,” Read said. “If you’ve had your voting rights restored but didn’t know it, what difference does it make?”

Manning rejects the idea that Oregon can’t do both things at once. “I am honored to be able to bring those ideas that others may be afraid to, even though they know it’s right,” he told Bolts. “Somebody has to stand up, somebody has to be up front, and I accept that challenge.”

Manning often speaks highly of his own ability to shepherd such big changes. “I’m a visionary,” he said during a candidate debate earlier this month. “I think ahead. I see things that could be and then I implement those. I am result-oriented. There is no one like me.”

Several civil rights advocates in Oregon who support letting people vote from prison say they’ve been frustrated that the state is not prioritizing the reform. 

“Constantly being told this is ‘not the right time’ is only furthering the racist undertones of how we got to this position,” said Zach Winston, who used to be incarcerated and now works at the Oregon Justice Research Center. In Oregon, as elsewhere, felony disenfranchisement is a relic of 19th-century schemes to deprive people of color of all kinds of civil rights.

Added Winston, “Oregon has never shied away from leading on voting rights, which begs the question: Why not, on this? Do they actually value people who are in prison?” 

While Manning speaks in maximalist terms—he says he wants to get Oregon to at least 98 percent turnout—Read speaks the language of incremental change: “Any effort to make it easier for people to vote, to remove barriers, is a good thing,” he said. His rhetoric may be less lofty but he says he’ll pay proper attention to the weeds of a system that’s often anything but flashy.  

“That grinding, diligent implementation approach really matters,” he told Bolts, “to make sure it’s done well.”

In fleshing out his priorities, Read proposed a statewide program that would send people notifications when their ballots have been accepted and again when they’ve been counted. He described this move, which some other states have already made, as a way to bolster Oregon’s existing mail voting program, ensuring that those who are using the system can trust that their votes are being counted, and take action if something seems amiss. 

“The payoff may well be worth it, just because of the increased confidence people will feel,” he said.

Read also wants to advocate for a bill to give voters more time before elections to declare a party affiliation, as a way to close what he sees as a loophole in the state’s automatic voter registration system. When Oregon automatically registers people to vote, it does not assign them to any party, and so, Read worries, some voters find themselves locked out of the state’s closed party primaries by the time they want to participate. 

His proposals would require action by the legislature, but Read says he’d use his standing as secretary of state to promote them. 

Manning’s priorities would also demand changes in the law; matters like voting from prison cannot be unilaterally reformed by the secretary of state. He told Bolts that he has built strong relationships in the legislature that will enable him to pass his agenda. When asked about input he’s received from colleagues who oppose prison voting, though, he said, “I don’t know. I’ve not asked them. But I think it would be a good conversation.”

Neither candidate offered many specifics as to how they’d run the secretary of state’s office, and what new initiatives they want to put in place in areas that fall under its direct supervision. 

Read signaled more comfort with the status quo in the office. Three former secretaries of state have endorsed him.

When asked how he would shape the office budget, and how he would distribute resources to match his priorities, Read often deferred offering details. And when asked how his office would improve communications with various groups—including formerly incarcerated Oregonians, whose engagement he said he wanted to improve before debating voting from prison—he did not mention a particular program. He repeatedly said he’d want to first consult and partner with community leaders before proposing any fixes.

Manning, too, told Bolts that he could not offer specifics on some of his plans since he is not yet the secretary of state.

While he generally expressed discontent at the pace at which the state implements voting rights measures, he didn’t identify any instances of frustration when asked to elaborate. “Until I’ve been actually in and have the opportunity to conduct sessions with the staff of the secretary of state’s office and also all of our county elections officers, only then will I be able to make a clear assessment of what it is we can fix and how fast we can get it done,” he said.

The secretary of state has discretion to innovate with programs that can reach voters in new ways and make elections smoother, stressed Brown, the former secretary of state and governor. 

Brown said maximizing the position’s potential may come down to realpolitik skills. “Where do you have the votes? What are the costs and available resources?” She said she supports voting rights from prison, though she isn’t convinced that can pass. The next secretary, she said, will need to get creative and “to literally throw spaghetti at the wall to see what sticks in terms of reaching out to these important and diverse populations.” 

Others experienced in Oregon’s elections system also hope that the state can keep improving, whether with ambitious projects or administrative fixes. 

“There’s a general sense that Oregon has proudly been a leader in so many ways, but it is a laggard in others,” said Phil Keisling, the former Oregon secretary of state who championed vote-by-mail in the 1990s. 

He fired off a slew of improvements he’d like to see. For one, he said, the state should allocate funds to cover elections costs so that local offices don’t have to scrap with their county commissions for funding. And he wants counties to set up more physical voting centers, so people don’t have to travel long distances if they want to access in-person services. 

Keisling, who today advocates for mail voting nationwide as chair of the National Vote At Home Institute, has endorsed Read in this race, though he told Bolts he’ll make this case to whomever wins this year.  “Oregon has often pointed to where the future needs to go, and is often a testing bed for new ideas and new approaches to enfranchise people,” he said. “I’ll be pushing whoever gets the nomination to continue that tradition.”

Others much more removed from the halls of power in Oregon say they have trouble seeing how their state can purport to lead on voting rights so long as it continues to block from voting the roughly 12,000 people held in its prisons at any one time. Black and Native American Oregonians are most disproportionately affected by that practice, a situation fueled today by the large racial disparities in the state’s criminal legal system.

“Oregon has led the way with our democratic values, but continued disenfranchisement undermines the very legitimacy of our democracy in the state,” said Mariana Garcia Medina, a policy advocate at the ACLU of Oregon. She wants Oregon to move past its “history of anti-Blackness and white supremacy,” referencing an 1857 constitutional convention that set up felony disenfranchisement and a suite of other explicitly racist restrictions on civil rights. 

Pickens expects that advancing a reform as significant as prison voting rights will be difficult regardless of who wins. He says he has observed firsthand that Oregon’s reputation as an elections trendsetter belies frequent general indifference, and occasional hostility, toward the concept that every Oregonian should have a voice in democracy. 

“For the working-class white American that’s been voting their entire lives, I’d point exactly that out: you’ve been doing it your entire lives. For entire generations,” Pickens said. “We were set up to be excluded.”

The post In Oregon Primary, A Study In Contrasts on How to Strengthen Democracy appeared first on Bolts.

The new measure passed by Republicans and signed into law by Alabama Republican Governor Kay Ivey last week makes it illegal for paid organizers to help others vote by mail, threatening the work of grassroots and national organizations who help voters register and cast their ballots. It includes a bevy of draconian punishments including lengthy jail sentences if paid organizers help others fill out or return their absentee ballots.

A lawsuit to block the bill is likely in the coming weeks.

“There’s definitely gonna be legal action,” Anneshia Hardy, the executive director of Alabama Values, a progressive advocacy organization, told Bolts. “That was already in discussion.”

A number of other leading civil rights groups who work in the state were tight-lipped about what their legal plans are, but they have been gearing up for this specific fight for some time. Last year, a nearly identical bill passed the Alabama House, but died in the senate. Kathy Jones, the head of Alabama League of Women Voters, told Bolts at the time that if the bill had passed then, “we would have sued.”

The law makes it even harder to vote by mail in one of the states with the most restrictive voting laws in the country, and threatens paid organizers with jail time if they violate its somewhat-vague provisions. Civil rights groups believe the new law is unconstitutional, but they’re even more worried about the fear the law will create for grassroots organizations’ efforts than the enforcement itself.

Hardy said she’d been talking to multiple groups who do voter education and outreach in the state who were alarmed that their normal work helping Black voters vote could now be illegal under the new law. And she said she’d been in touch with allied groups in Florida, which passed a similar law two years ago, about how they navigated that situation. 

“Some of the organizations stop the effort [to help people vote], because of the ambiguity and also, quite frankly, not wanting to take that risk. It makes a hostile climate for groups who are just trying to ensure that people have access to voting,” she said.

The new law bans anyone besides immediate family members and cohabitants from turning in anyone else’s completed absentee ballot applications, with the exception for people with disabilities or who can’t read or write, in an attempt to root out voter fraud by targeting what Republicans derisively call “ballot harvesting.”

Anyone who knowingly pays someone else to request, collect, or deliver absentee ballots could face a Class B felony charge—the same felony class as first-degree manslaughter in Alabama—which carries a prison sentence of up to 20 years. Anyone who is paid to request, collect, complete, prefill, obtain or deliver a voter’s absentee ballot faces a class C felony—the same felony class as looting, third-degree robbery and stalking—punishable by up to ten years in prison.

This new law comes amidst a renewed war from Alabama Republicans to restrict voting access in the state and strengthen their vice-like grip on political power at the expense of the state’s sizeable African American population. 

Last year, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that the state’s Republican legislators had violated the Voting Rights Act with an illegal gerrymander of Alabama’s congressional district lines, and ordered them to draw a second district where Black voters would have a say in who represents them. Even that didn’t stop those lawmakers, who proceeded to try to ignore the Supreme Court’s ruling until another court ordered them to reverse course.

Even before this new law passed, Alabama had some of the most onerous voting systems in the country. It’s one of only four states that allows no opportunities for people to vote early in-person, along with Delaware, Mississippi and New Hampshire. It also is one of just 20 states still requiring people to have a specific reason for voting absentee by mail.

And there have been very few proven cases of voter fraud in Alabama. Even the conservative Heritage Foundation, a major proponent of anti-voting fraud legislation, has identified just 20 cases of voting fraud in Alabama since 2000. The only person charged with voting fraud in the last five years is former Republican state Representative David Cole.

“This is a bill that is proposing incarceration and criminal penalties for a problem that doesn’t exist,” ACLU Alabama staff attorney Laurel Hattix said during testimony against the bill last month.

But that hasn’t stopped Alabama Republicans from crying fraud.

When Ivey signed the bill into law last Wednesday, she declared “Under my watch, there will be no funny business in Alabama elections.”

The recently passed law was long a passion project for Alabama Secretary of State Wes Allen, who introduced a similar bill in 2022, when he was still in the state legislature. 

Allen, also a Republican, said in a statement after Ivey signed the bill into law that its passage “signals to ballot harvesters that Alabama votes are not for sale.”

But during his tenure as secretary of state, Allen has actually eroded safeguards against voter fraud. His first official act in office was to pull Alabama out of the Electronic Registration Information Center (ERIC), a bipartisan, multi-state information-sharing effort that helps states identify voters who are also registered in other states in order to help prevent voting fraud. 

Allen was one of a number of Republican secretaries of state to attack, then quit, the organization after it became a target of false right-wing conspiracy theories. Allen has now attempted to set up a parallel version of ERIC, partnering with a handful of other red states in an effort that experts say lacks the basic information necessary to be accurate and effective.

Ronald James, an Alabama political consultant who until recently was the state organizer for Black Voters Matter, said that the new law will “scare a lot of people” and be “devastating” to grassroots groups like his former organization that work to help Black voters cast absentee ballots—especially rural elderly voters and those with limited literacy.

James said he’d worked with grassroots organizations in recent years whose normal activities are now considered felonies, like giving gas money to volunteers to drive others to vote, “or paying volunteers who are dedicated to making sure that people in senior citizen homes and elderly in their churches and in the neighborhood and community have a chance to cast their ballot.”

Now, if those volunteers violate the new law, they and the organization’s leaders alike could be facing jail time.

“There’s going to be a lot of people—a lot of people who just are not able to vote,” he said. “It’s catastrophic to the political scope of how we are active in communities, particularly in Black communities.”

The post Alabama Civil Rights Groups Scramble to Fight Back Against New Voting Law appeared first on Bolts.

In this guide, Bolts introduces you to ten elections that are coming up this month that will impact how local officials administer future elections, and how easily people can exercise their voting rights. 

Voters this month will select the secretaries of state of Kentucky, Louisiana, and Mississippi, who’ll each be the chief elections officials within their state. They will choose a new supreme court justice in Pennsylvania, a swing state with looming election law battles, and dozens of county officials who’ll decide how easy it is to vote in Pennsylvania and Washington state next year. And some ballot measures may change election law in Maine and Michigan.

All these elections are scheduled for Nov. 7, except for Louisiana’s runoff on Nov. 18. 

As we cover the places where democracy is on the ballot, our staff is also keeping an eye on the other side of the coin—the people who are excluded from having a say in their democracy: Three of the eight states featured on this page have among the nation’s harshest laws barring people with criminal convictions from the polls, and our three-part series highlights their stories. And beyond the stakes for voting rights, our cheat sheet to the 2023 elections also lays out dozens of other local elections this November that will shape criminal justice, abortion access, education, and other issues. 

Kentucky | Secretary of state

Michael Adams, the Republican secretary of state of Kentucky, has vocally pushed back against the false conspiracies surrounding the 2020 election, and he has touted his efforts to facilitate mail and early voting during the pandemic. He survived the GOP primary this spring by beating back election deniers who wanted to replace him as the state’s chief election administrator.

Buddy Wheatley, Adams’ Democratic challenger and a former lawmaker, says the state should go much further in expanding ballot access. The Cincinnati Enquirer reports that the candidates disagree on whether the state should institute same-day registration and set-up an independent redistricting commission, two proposals of Wheatley’s that Adams opposes. 

The election is unfolding in the shadow of the governor’s race, in which Democratic incumbent Andy Beshear is running for reelection four years after restoring the voting rights of hundreds of thousands of people who had been barred from voting for life. (Adams and Wheatley have both said they support the executive order.) Voting rights advocates regret that the order still leaves hundreds of thousands Kentuckians shut out from voting and that the state hasn’t done enough to notify newly-enfranchised residents; Bolts reports that a coalition led by formerly incarcerated activists has stepped into that void to register people.

Louisiana | Secretary of state 

In trying to appease election deniers since the 2020 presidential election, Republican Secretary of State Kyle Ardoin weakened Louisiana’s voting system and gave a platform to election conspiracists. His successor will be decided in a Nov. 18 runoff between Republican Nancy Landry, who currently serves as his deputy, and Gwen Collins-Greenup, a Democratic attorney. Each received 19 percent of the vote in the all-party primary on Oct. 14, but Landry is favored in the Nov. 18 runoff since much of the remainder of the vote went to other Republican contenders.

Not unlike Ardoin, Landry has resisted election deniers’ most radical proposals but she has also echoed unfounded suspicions of voter fraud and election irregularities, Cameron Joseph reported in Bolts. The next secretary of state will have to deal with continued pressure from the far-right, Joseph writes, while making critical decisions regarding the state’s outdated voting equipment: The state’s efforts to replace the equipment have stalled in recent years amid unfounded election conspiracies about the role of machines in skewing election results.

Maine | Question 8

Since its drafting two centuries ago, Maine’s constitution has barred people who are under guardianship from voting in state and local elections. Then, in 2001, a federal court declared the provision to be invalid in response to a lawsuit filed by an organization that protects the rights of disabled residents.

Mainers may scrub this exclusionary language from its state constitution on Nov. 7, S.E. Smith explains in Bolts: Question 8 would “remove a provision prohibiting a person under guardianship for reasons of mental illness from voting.” While Mainers under guardianship can already vote irrespective of this constitutional amendment due to the 2001 court ruling, Smith reports that the referendum could spark momentum for other states with exclusionary rules to revise who can cast ballots and shake up what is now a complicated patchwork of eligibility rules nationwide. 

Michigan | Municipal referendums on ranked choice voting

Three Michigan cities will each decide whether to switch to ranked-choice voting—a system in which voters rank the different candidates on the ballot rather than only opting for one—for their local elections. If the initiatives pass, residents in East Lansing, Kalamazoo, and Royal Oak would join Ann Arbor, which approved a similar measure in 2021.

But there’s a catch: Even if voters approve ranked choice voting, it will not be implemented until the state of Michigan first adopts a bill authorizing the method statewide. The legislation to do so has stalled in the legislature so far.

Many cities have newly adopted ranked-choice voting in recent years, and some will use the method for the first time this November; they include Boulder, Colorado, and several Utah cities such as Salt Lake. Other municipalities this fall will also consider changing local rules: Rockville, Maryland, in the suburbs of D.C., holds two advisory referendums on whether their city should lower the voting age to 16 and enable noncitizens to vote in local elections.

Mississippi | Secretary of state

Republican Michael Watson spent his first term as secretary of state defending restrictions on ballot access. He stated he worries about more college students voting, rejected expanding mail voting during the COVID-19 pandemic, and championed a law that banned assisting people in casting an absentee ballot (the law was blocked by a court this summer). He is currently fighting  a lawsuit against the state’s practice of permanently disenfranchising people with some felony convictions.

Watson is now seeking a second term against Democrat Ty Pinkins, an attorney who only jumped into the race in September after the prior Democratic nominee withdrew for health reasons. Pinkins has taken Watson to task for backing these restrictions, and he says he is running to expand opportunities to vote, such as setting up online and same-day voter registration. Pinkins this fall also teamed up with Greta Kemp Martin—the Democrat challenging Attorney General Lynn Fitch, who is currently representing Watson in the lawsuit against felony disenfranchisement—to say that the state should expand rights restoration for people with felony convictions.

Pennsylvania | Supreme court justice

Pennsylvanians will fill a vacant seat on their state’s high court, where Democrats currently enjoy a majority. The outcome cannot change partisan control but it will still shape election law in this swing state, Bolts’ Alex Burness reports. For one, a GOP win would make it easier for the party to flip the court in 2025, affecting redistricting. It may also make it easier for the GOP to win election lawsuits next year: Voting cases haven’t always been party-line for this court, especially ones that revolve around how permissive the state should be toward mail ballots. Recent rulings made it more likely that mail ballots with clerical mistakes get tossed, an issue that now looms over the 2024 election.

Burness reports that Republican nominee Carolyn Carluccio has echoed Trump’s attacks against mail voting, implying an unfounded connection to election fraud, and she appeared to invite a new legal challenge to a state law that expanded ballot access in 2019. Dan McCaffery, her Democratic opponent, has defended state efforts to make voting more convenient, telling Bolts, “If we’re going to err, we should always err on the side of including votes.”

Pennsylvania | Bucks County commission

Pennsylvanians are electing the local officials who’ll run the 2024 elections, and the results will shape how easy it is for millions of people to vote next year in the nation’s biggest swing state. Daniel Nichanian reports in Bolts that counties have a great deal of discretion when it comes to the modalities of voting by mail, and local voting rights attorneys warn that if more counties adopt tighter rules, tens of thousands of additional ballots may be rejected.

Bucks County stands as the clearest jurisdiction to watch, Nichanian writes. Democrats gained control of the commission in 2019, part of a firewall against Trump’s efforts to game the following year’s election. The county commissioners made it easier to vote by mail, attracting legal challenges from Trump.  Now, they’re now running for reelection, but the Republican Party is hoping to gain control of this swing county’s commission. 

Also keep an eye on the Democratic efforts to retain majorities in the other Pennsylvania counties they gained in 2019, often for the first time in decades: Delaware, Chester, Lehigh, and Monroe. The GOP would also gain control of the board of elections in Allegheny County, home to Pittsburgh, if it scores an upset in the county executive race. Sam DeMarco, who signed up as a fake Trump elector in 2020, is already certain to sit on Allegheny County’s board of elections.

Pennsylvania | Berks County commission

Will any Pennsylvania county try to stall the certification of elections next year, in a repeat of Trump’s strategy in the aftermath of the 2020 presidential race? The results of next week’s elections will determine which are susceptible to try out such a strategy, Daniel Nichanian reports in Bolts. Election attorneys told him that this would be a dereliction of duties on the part of county commissioners but that it may still cause some legal and political upheaval. Already in 2022, the Republican commissioners in three counties resisted certifying results because they insisted on rejecting valid mail ballots; they’re now all seeking reelection.

The Democratic challengers running in Berks County—the most politically competitive of these three counties—say this is a key issue in their race. “The most important thing is that we have a board of commissioners that endorses the winner of a campaign,” one of them told Bolts. But they’re also running on a platform of easing mail voting by installing more accessible ballot drop boxes, and instituting new policies to notify residents if their ballots have a clerical error. Also keep an eye on Fayette and Lancaster, the other counties that tried to not certify the 2022 results, and in the many red jurisdictions where candidates with ties to election deniers made it past the Republican primaries.

Virginia | Legislative control

Since Virginia Republicans gained the governorship and state House in 2021, they have passed bills through the lower chamber to repeal same-day voter registration and get rid of ballot drop boxes, among other restrictive measures. Until now, these bills have died in the Democratic-run Senate. But will that change after Nov. 7, when Virginians elect all lawmakers?

The GOP is hoping to gain control of the Senate while defending its majority in the House, Bolts reports, a combination that would hand them full control of the state government and open the floodgates for the party’s conservative agenda on how the commonwealth should run elections. Inversely, if Democrats have a great night—flipping the House and keeping the Senate—they may have more oversight over Governor Glenn Youngkin’s dramatic curtailment of rights restoration and over his administration’s wrongful voter purges; still, those matters are decided within the executive branch, and the governor’s office is not on the ballot until 2025.

Washington | King County director of elections

Only one county in the entire state of Washington is electing its chief administrator. It just so happens to be King County, home to Seattle and more than 2 million residents—in a race that features a staunch election denier, no less. Doug Basler has sowed doubts about Washington state’s election system since the 2020 election, alongside others on the far-right, and he has helped a lawsuit against its mail voting system.

Basler is a heavy underdog on Nov. 7 in his challenge against Julie Wise, the Director of King County Elections. This is a heavily Democratic county, though there will be no partisan label on the ballot, potentially blunting the effect of Basler’s Republican affiliation. Still, Cameron Joseph reports in Bolts that the spread of false election conspiracies—even when they are defeated at the ballot box—is fueling a threatening climate. “It’s a very scary time to be an election administrator,” Wise told Bolts.

The post 10 Local Elections This Month That Matter to Voting Rights appeared first on Bolts.

A boon for the GOP, the results will have stark consequences for state policy, easing the way for new legislation that would target LGBTQ+ residents, and empowering politicians who have championed draconian anti-crime measures and attacks on public education. They will likely set up more clashes between the conservative state government and the city of New Orleans. 

The results also signaled that election conspiracies continue to resonate with the GOP base, as several campaigns emerged triumphant after fueling false allegations of fraud during a critical juncture for the state’s voting systems. Jeff Landry, the incoming governor, tried to help Donald Trump overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election as attorney general, and he doubled down on his alliance with the former president during his campaign this year.

Bolts covered the elections in the lead-up to Oct. 14, with an eye to its ramifications for criminal justice and voting rights. Below are seven takeaways on the results. 

1. Landry’s win hands the GOP a new trifecta

Jeff Landry, the state’s arch-conservative attorney general, easily prevailed in the governor’s race on Saturday, receiving 52 percent in a 16-person field. He will replace John Bel Edwards, a Democrat who was barred from seeking reelection due to term limits. 

Landry’s victory hands Republicans full control of the state government for the first time since 2015, since his party also defended its large majorities in the state House and Senate.

The result will free conservative policy ambitions, which were held back over the last eight years by Edwards’ veto power. Even when the GOP gained a supermajority capable of overriding Edwards’ vetoes earlier this year, it remained frequently unable to do so. This summer, for instance, the GOP failed to muster the votes to override Edwards on a bill that would have prevented discussion of sexual orientation and gender identity in schools. 

Landry is sure to bring an entirely different outlook on such issues. Throughout his career, he has pushed Louisiana to restrict LGBTQ+ rights and block teaching of such issues in education, including at the collegiate level. Last year, Landry created a new tool for people to file complaints against teachers and libraries. He has also worked for the state to obtain information about Louisiana residents who travel out of state to obtain gender-affirming care or abortions.

Landry has fiercely fought local and state reforms meant to reduce the state’s near-record incarceration rate, Bolts reported in a profile of the attorney general in August. This year alone, he ran ads lambasting “woke DAs,” fought efforts by Louisianans on death row to seek clemency, and championed a measure, which ultimately did not pass, that would have opened the criminal records of children as young as 13 to the public—but only in three predominantly Black parishes. 

2. Things are about to get more complicated for New Orleans

Republican-run states commonly preempt liberal policies adopted in their cities, so just the fact that the GOP gained a trifecta in Louisiana would put New Orleans in a tough spot. But beyond that, Landry has been particularly aggressive in undercutting his state’s most populous city. As attorney general, he retaliated against New Orleans officials when they crafted policies to protect immigrants and to shield residents from anti-abortion laws, proposing to withhold flood protection funds. He has also undermined efforts to reform New Orleans police while also setting up a short-lived state task force with the authority to make arrests in the city. 

And Landry has made it clear he would double down as governor, telling Tucker Carlson last year that the governor’s office in Louisiana “has the ability to bend that city to his will,” and that “we will.”

New Orleans voters on Saturday signaled their appetite for a very different politics. Landry received less than 10 percent of the vote in the city, far behind Democrat Shawn Wilson who drew 71 percent. A former public defender with some progressive support, Leon Roché, also defeated a former prosecutor for a position as criminal court judge in the parish. And one of Louisiana’s most left-leaning lawmakers, Mandie Landry (no relationship to Jeff Landry), defeated more centrist challengers in a heated state House race for an uptown district.

On Sunday, even as she celebrated her own win, Mandie Landry said she was preparing for a “sobering” stretch for her city. “I think there is going to be more of a push from Baton Rouge to interfere in New Orleans than usual,” she told Bolts. “I am not under any delusions.”

3. This was a low-turnout election

For an election that will deeply affect Louisiana, engagement was very low: just 36 percent of registered voters turned out on Saturday.

Turnout fell sharply in the state’s two most populous urban regions, which vote very Democratic. Compared to the 2020 presidential election, the number of voters who cast a ballot fell by 60 percent in New Orleans and by 52 percent in East Baton Rouge Parish. In the rest of the state, it only fell by 49 percent. 

Mandie Landry, the New Orleans lawmaker, faults the state Democratic Party for doing little outreach to her city’s voters. Compared to the “huge efforts to get out the vote” she witnessed in 2015 and 2019, “there was none of that this time,” she told Bolts. “I didn’t see any get out the vote effort.” The state Democratic Party, which scarcely spent money in the run-up to the primary, did not respond to a request for comment. 

4. Secretary of state race heads to a runoff, but a new frontrunner emerges

Republican Secretary of State Kyle Ardoin has tried to appease election conspiracists since 2020, for instance quitting a multi-state consortium that monitors voter registration after false claims that it was tied to George Soros. With Ardoin retiring this year, the big question on Saturday was which of the many Republican candidates would advance to a runoff. 

Ardoin’s deputy Nancy Landry (no relation to Jeff Landry or Mandie Landry) barely edged out her rivals, coming in first with 19 percent. Bolts reported earlier this month that, much like her boss, Landry has resisted election deniers’ most radical proposals while also echoing unfounded suspicions of voter fraud and election irregularities. 

Mike Francis, the Republican who most firmly rejected election conspiracies, very narrowly lost out on a runoff spot, coming in third with 18 percent. Brandon Trosclair, a little-known businessman who ran as a hardline election denier and called for fully hand-counting ballots, got 6 percent.

Landry will now face Democrat Gwen Collins-Greenup, an attorney who snatched the second runoff spot. Collins-Greenup got 19 percent as well, but Landry will be the clear front-runner since all Republican candidates combined for 68 percent of the vote cast on Saturday. The state is at a crossroads on election administration since it has to soon replace its outdated voting equipment, an issue around which the far-right has mobilized.

5. In first referendum inspired by “Zuckerbucks,” voters ban private election grants 

Voters overwhelmingly approved Amendment 1, a measure that will block Louisiana’s election offices from receiving private grants from outside organizations. 

A non-profit with ties to Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg donated hundreds of millions of dollars in 2020 to local election offices nationwide, in order to help them run elections during the early pandemic. The right quickly dubbed these grants “Zuckerbucks,” fueling conspiracies about election interference, and many GOP-run states proceeded to pass laws to ban such grants. To circumvent the Democratic governor’s veto, Republican lawmakers in Louisiana placed such a ban directly on the ballot for the first time.

Some elections experts critical of such bans share the reservations about private money flowing into elections, but they also stress that public funding is woefully inadequate, and that the bans risk further starving cash-strapped offices, threatening election security rather than protecting it. 

“Nobody’s got money to pay election officials what they’re worth (particularly in this new environment), to invest in new systems, to make improvements to back-end security,” Justin Levitt, a voting expert who now teaches at Loyola Law School, told Bolts on Sunday. “If the state actually responded by funding the elections we deserve, banning private money wouldn’t be the worst outcome. Private donations were only ever there to stop the bridge from collapsing entirely. They never should have been necessary. Yet they were.”

He added, “I think we can all hope that we’re not dealing with that kind of 10-alarm fire in 2024.”

6. In sheriff’s races, a sea of white men—again

Sixty-three parishes held sheriff elections, and only three even featured women running for the office. All lost on Saturday. 

This means that all 63 parishes have elected a man, or are sure to do so after the Nov. 18 runoffs. This dynamic is nothing new: All of these parishes already have a male sheriff. 

Nearly all incoming sheriffs will also be white. Across these 63 parishes, only three elected a Black sheriff on Saturday, with Black candidates advancing to a runoff in three additional parishes. By contrast, 57 of these 63 parishes elected a white sheriff on Saturday or will do so after the runoff. Louisiana’s population is 30 percent Black. 

This pattern is symptomatic of the societal biases regarding what law enforcement should look like, though breaking it up would not in itself change brutal conditions and treatment inside the state’s jails. And here again, New Orleans stands out from the rest of the state.

Its sheriff, Susan Hutson, is a Black woman who took office in 2022 (New Orleans holds its elections on a different cycle than all other parishes, and so Hudson was not on the ballot this fall). “As a woman and as a Black woman, I go through additional types of microaggressions in the job,” Hutson told Verite News last year. “So just having somebody else there who might be experiencing something similar with me, it’s good—it’s good to see someone like you.”

7. East Baton Rouge sheriff secures another four years 

The jail in Louisiana’s most populous parish is notorious for an alarming death rate and for the brutal treatment of people detained there. But, as Bolts reported in August, organizers and civil rights lawyers have run into Sheriff Sid Gautreaux, who has overseen the facility for 15-plus years, boosted by campaign contributions from people and groups that benefit from more jail spending. 

Gautreaux won reelection with 86 percent of the vote on Saturday. He is a Republican in a heavily blue jurisdiction but he faced no Democrat; two opponents were kicked off the ballot over the summer, though neither was expected to mount a serious challenge to the entrenched sheriff.

Reverend Alexis Anderson, co-founder of the East Baton Rouge Parish Prison Reform Coalition, a local organization that has pushed back against the sheriff’s practices, told Bolts on Sunday that she would continue to demand accountability regardless of these results. “I stand committed to working towards independent investigations of each and every death that has occurred in that facility under the Gautreaux administration,” she said. “We will continue engaging our community on the development of real public safety tools.”

Anderson added, “There are too many lives at stake to become discouraged.”

Piper French contributed reporting for this article.

The post Louisiana Takes a Hard Swing to the Right appeared first on Bolts.

Louisiana’s leading Republican candidates for secretary of state have largely rejected calls from election conspiracists to upend the state’s voting system, but they’re still courting GOP base voters who continue to believe Donald Trump’s lies that he won the 2020 election.

Some of the main contenders in next week’s election are playing rhetorical footsie with the hard right in the campaign to replace retiring Republican incumbent Kyle Ardoin, whose own efforts to appease election deniers weakened Louisiana’s voting system without saving his political career.

Whoever replaces him as the state’s next chief election administrator will have to deal with continued pressure from conspiracists while making decisions about everything from administering the 2024 presidential election to replacing Louisiana’s aging voting equipment. 

Louisiana uses touchscreen electronic voting machines that are almost two decades old and prone to error, and do not include a paper ballot printout, making results impossible to audit. State officials have been mulling how to replace the equipment for years now to address these concerns but their efforts have repeatedly stalled, and far-right conspiracists have jumped into the fray to push for a radical reboot of the election system.

Brandon Trosclair, the most hardline candidate in the race, wants to switch to hand-counting elections, mirroring an approach some far right politicians have pushed around the nation that experts warn would produce inaccurate counts.

Local political observers doubt Trosclair has a real shot at winning the race, and most of the front-running candidates strongly oppose his calls for such a dramatic overhaul while supporting plans to acquire new voting machines with a paper trail. 

But two of the top candidates, Ardoin’s lieutenant Nancy Landry and state Speaker Clay Schexnayder, have also hedged their responses to false concerns of widespread fraud in a seeming attempt to appeal to the Republican voters in the state who still believe the game is rigged, a sign that they could fall into the same appeasement trap that Ardoin did in office. On top of that, Jeff Landry, the Louisiana Attorney General who joined Texas’ attempts to overturn the 2020 election in four swing states won by President Biden, is favored to win Louisiana’s governorship this fall, which would hand him more power to pressure the eventual secretary of state on how to run elections.

Schexnayder, Trosclair, and Nancy Landry (no relationship to Jeff Landry) are running in the Oct. 14 primary alongside five other candidates, including Public Service Commissioner Mike Francis, the Republican who is most direct about rejecting election conspiracies. Democrats Gwen Collins-Greenup, an attorney who received 41 percent of the vote in the 2019 runoff for secretary of state, and Arthur Morrell, a former court clerk in New Orleans, will be on the ballot as well.

The top two in the all-party primary will advance to a mid-November runoff regardless of party. 

Francis, Landry, and Schexnayder have raised the most money and are the only candidates currently running statewide TV ads, according to local Republicans tracking ad buys. With early voting already underway, at least one of those three Republicans is expected to advance to the runoff, where they would be favored since this is a deep red state. There’s a possibility that the Democratic candidates split their party’s vote and two Republicans advance.

Pearson Cross, a political science professor and associate dean at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette, said the leading Republicans’ message on widespread voter fraud has been “that they’re concerned about it, but it’s not an issue here.”

This attempt to walk a tightrope—defending their own state’s election system while nodding to more general worries about the 2020 elections—was also attempted by other state officials.

Ardoin, the outgoing secretary of state, spent years trying to appease the state’s far right who claimed that Louisiana’s elections were rife with fraud. Ardoin allowed MyPillow CEO Mike Lindell, a leading proponent of disproven election fraud theories, to air his views at an official hearing of the Louisiana Voting Systems Commission. 

Ardoin also pulled his state out of the Electronic Registration Information Center (ERIC), a bipartisan, multi-state collaborative effort that monitors whether people illegally vote in multiple states. 

More than 30 states run by both Democrats and Republicans were part of ERIC with little controversy until it became a target on the far right when the Gateway Pundit website falsely claimed that it was secretly a “left-wing voter registration drive” bankrolled by liberal billionaire George Soros. Ardoin announced he would quit the program shortly thereafter, at an event hosted by a group of election-denying conservative activists in early 2022. Seven other GOP-controlled states have since followed suit, with Texas officially planning to withdraw later this month.

Every state that leaves ERIC not only limits its own ability to detect voter fraud but hurts the entire endeavor, because it relies on states communicating with each other to identify if a voter casts their ballot in multiple states.

But Ardoin’s actions were not enough for conspiracy theorists, and they continued to hound him throughout his tenure. He decided this spring not to run for reelection, triggering Louisiana’s first secretary of state race without an incumbent since 1987—and slammed them in a statement.

“I hope that Louisianans of all political persuasions will stand against the pervasive lies that have eroded trust in our elections by using conspiracies so far-fetched that they belong in a work of fiction,” Ardoin said. “The vast majority of Louisiana’s voters know that our elections are secure and accurate, and it is shameful and outright dangerous that a small minority of vocal individuals have chosen to denigrate the hard work of our election staff and spread unproven falsehoods.”

Ardoin’s decision to quit ERIC hasn’t come up much at all on the campaign trail, but Francis, one of the leading Republican candidates, told Bolts he planned to rejoin the organization so long as new information didn’t come to light during his technical review. “I plan to go back to that unless something surfaces,”he said. 

It’s unclear where Landry and Schexnayder stand—neither has mentioned it on the campaign trail and their campaigns didn’t respond to questions from Bolts about the program. 

Kentucky Secretary of State Michael Adams, a Republican who defeated primary challenges from election deniers in May, told Bolts at the time that he wished public officials did not bow to such pressure. Referring to Louisiana, Adams said Ardoin “dropped out of ERIC and did the things that he thought he had to do to survive, and it didn’t work, he got run out of his race.”   

“I’ve seen my colleagues in the same job in other states try to feed the tiger,” Adams said. “I’ve seen them make decisions that I think were probably not good for their voters to try to survive a primary and all it does is just validate the conspiracy theories.”

In Louisiana, the secretary of state candidate most invested in these conspiracy theories hasn’t gotten much traction.

As of Oct. 4, Trosclair’s campaign website included a countdown clock to the Nov. 18 runoff, not the October 14 all-candidate election. He’d raised less than $100,000 for the race as of early September campaign finance reports, and has made no ad buys.

“It’s very difficult if you have no money and are trying to sell a narrative that people in this state don’t believe and a system that they don’t want,” Schexnayder adviser Lionel Rainey III said about Trosclair.

One prominent local Republican is helping Trosclair. When Bolts reached out to Trosclair with an interview request, Lenar Whitney, a former state lawmaker and current national committeewoman for the Republican Party of Louisiana with a long history of circulating conspiracies, called back and said that she was working on his campaign. Trosclair never called back. 

Trosclair has made clear his lack of faith in the state’s elections in no uncertain terms. 

“Safe and secure? I don’t think so,” he said of Louisiana’s system at a candidate forum on Sept. 21. “I don’t trust it at all.”

But some of the other GOP candidates are also courting election deniers, even as they defend their own state’s system. 

Nancy Landry’s campaign announcement video criticized election procedures in other states like Arizona and Pennsylvania. And she has hedged when asked if Joe Biden had legitimately won the 2020 election. 

“I do think that President Biden is the legitimate president, but I do think there were some very troubling allegations of irregularities in many states,” she said at the same Sept. 21 forum, before adding that Louisiana has “safe, fair and accurate elections.”

“I understand people’s concerns and their lack of confidence in elections. I think most of it is based on what they’ve heard that happened in other states,” she said later. 

She has also echoed a conspiracy spread by the far right since the 2020 election, attacking Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg for donating funds to help struggling local election offices at the height of the COVID-19 pandemic. “We must also continue efforts to prohibit private funding of elections from California leftists like Mark Zuckerberg,” she said in her announcement video. 

Louisiana did not receive any of the Zuckerberg funding in 2020 after Jeff Landry, the attorney general, stepped in to prohibit it. But Louisiana could be on its way to ban any future private elections funding if an amendment question put on the Oct. 14 ballot passes. 

Schexnayder won his speakership because of Democratic support and while his relationship with some legislative Democrats soured in recent years, he’s seen as more of a moderate than Landry. But he, too, has taken the tack that Louisiana’s elections are safe while stoking concerns about how other states and the feds handle elections, saying in an August TV interview that he wanted to ensure “we don’t have any overreach from the federal government to come in and manipulate elections.”

He has promised to create a board to “investigate all and any allegations made towards election irregularities”—a move that would mirror the creation of new investigative bodies in other red states, spurred by unfounded concerns of widespread fraud. 

Francis, a wealthy oilman and former state party chairman, has expressed significantly more skepticism of voting fraud theories than the other candidates.

“I voted for Trump. I’m very conservative,” he told Bolts. “I don’t agree that the election was stolen from him, because there’s no proof of that. I’ve been watching the news and all of the conspiracy theorists. Give me the proof that it was stolen.”

He still plans to give these theories air time, saying that as secretary of state he would organize a “technical conference” to test “all these accusations about the wrongdoing.” But he said he hopes that the conference might help convince them that “we have good solid elections.”

One reason that Louisians who are spreading lies about the 2020 election are so fired up is because Louisiana’s machines are leased from Dominion Voting Systems, which Trump and his allies have falsely claimed were involved in rigging the elections. 

For Trosclair and his allies, the solution is switching to an all-paper system with hand-marked and hand-counted ballots. That idea has been promoted by Trump allies like Lindell, the CEO of MyPillow, but elections experts say it would be much more prone to error.

The leading candidates have distanced themselves from proposals for hand-counting: They say they want to replace the old machines with new ones that will provide a paper backup in case anything goes wrong with the count and to audit the system.

But they’ve also acknowledged that voting machines may be unpopular with the GOP base.

“Don’t boo me, but we do have Dominion machines,” Schexnayder joked at a recent event, before explaining that they were secure. He promised that the updated machines would follow a similar model, while also creating an auditable paper trail.

Landry and Francis have similarly said they’d acquire new machines with an auditable paper trail, as has Collins-Greenup.

At a recent candidate forum, Trosclair declared “If you live in Louisiana and you think our elections are just fine there are seven other candidates that are going to change very little or nothing about the process.”

He may be right—but his opponents’ rhetoric during the campaign shows how powerful his movement remains in Louisiana politics.

The post Election Conspiracies Loom Over Louisiana’s Secretary of State Race appeared first on Bolts.

Still, all six commissioners secured the Republican nominations on Tuesday in their bids to serve another four years in these offices.

Should they prevail again in November’s general election—and these are all red-leaning counties—they’ll retain control of local election administration during the 2024 presidential cycle. 

Duncan Hopkins, a local organizer with the group Lancaster Stands Up who confronted Lancaster County GOP commissioners Ray D’Agostino and Josh Parsons at a public meeting last fall about their ties to election deniers, is alarmed by this landscape.

“We are looking at elected officials—at the highest levels, I’m thinking of former President Trump, all the way down to county election board officials—and we are seeing that they will work very hard to find a way to take votes away from people, even from people who voted for them, just to prove that it’s something that they can do legally,” Hopkins told Bolts on Wednesday. “It’s distressing.”

In most of Pennsylvania, county commissioners double as local boards of elections, with duties ranging from supervising voter registration to tabulating ballots. Their role in certifying election results has emerged as a critical lynchpin in Trump allies’ efforts to take over election administration. “Sometimes the vote counter is more important than the candidate,” Trump told Pennsylvania Republicans last year. But these county officials have broad effects on voting rights beyond the count since they shape people’s access to different ways of voting.

D’Agostino and Parsons last year voted to remove Lancaster County’s only drop box for mail-in ballots, for instance, and Hopkins is concerned by local commissioners’ crusade against mail voting, which is central to Trump’s own lies about fraud. “There are a fair number of people who in the Republican Party have tried to make voting more difficult by taking away ballot drop boxes, making it more difficult to vote by mail,” he said.

D’Agostino and Parsons faced no opponent in Lancaster’s Republican primary on Tuesday. In Berks County, incumbents Christian Leinbach and Michael Rivera prevailed against three challengers, while Fayette County incumbents Scott Dunn and Dave Lohr won against two. 

Similar results played out throughout the state. Local GOP officials have attempted to block election certification in a handful of other counties since 2020. And in an extensive investigation of public statements made by county commissioner candidates, Votebeat and Spotlight PA identified additional Republicans who have amplified false conspiracies about voter fraud. 

In total, 20 incumbent commissioners were on the ballot this week after supporting the Big Lie in either word—repeating denialist rhetoric in public statements—or else in deed, by refusing to certify a recent election. Eighteen of them won their Republican primaries, most of them in contested races. 

In Allegheny County, home to Pittsburgh, Councilmember Samuel DeMarco was unopposed for the GOP nomination on Tuesday, three years after voting to not certify the local presidential results and even signing up as a fake Trump elector. 

DeMarco, in fact, is a very rare elected official anywhere in the country who agreed to add his name to alternate elector lists willing to declare their state’s electoral votes for Trump despite the Republican’s loss in their state. DeMarco was interviewed by the FBI last year as part of an investigation into these schemes; he defended himself, saying that the list was only meant to be used in case the courts overturned the results. “When we did not win in court, the matter ended,” he told TribLive last year.

The Trump campaign’s lawsuits themselves were on flimsy grounds, and numerous judges in 2020 expressed alarm that they were being asked to disenfranchise millions of voters. DeMarco, who is also the chair of the local Republican Party in Allegheny County, Pennsylvania’s second most populous county, did not return a request for comment. 

Joe Gale, a commissioner in Montgomery County, is one of the two exceptions. Gale voted against certifying election results in 2020, though as the sole Republican on his county board he was not able to block them. “There is no way to verify the authenticity of one half of the votes cast this year,” he said at the time, mirroring lies spread by Trump allies about the results. He doubled down, later opposing certifying the 2022 elections as well. Gale was ousted on Tuesday, finishing third in the Republican primary when only the first two vote-getters move forward to the general election.

But even that vote was not a complete repudiation of election denialism; the Republican who got the most votes in Montgomery, Thomas DiBello, has himself repeatedly amplified false allegations of widespread voter fraud, as uncovered by Spotlight PA and Votebeat.

Another election-denying commissioner who lost on Tuesday is Stuart Ulsh of Fulton County, a small and rural jurisdiction. Fulton was Pennsylvania’s only known county whose commissioners agreed to let a private group, connected with Trump lawyer Sydney Powell, conduct a so-called audit of voting equipment. State officials then decertified the county’s voting equipment, saying they could no longer be sure it was secure since a third-party had toyed with the machines. 

Ulsh, who later testified in the legislature in defense of this scheme, was eliminated on Tuesday. But his colleague Randy Bunch, who approved that audit alongside Ulsh, came in first in the Republican primary and will move to the general election alongside another Republican. 

Other counties that feature incumbent commissioners who amplified false fraud conspiracies include Beaver, Butler, Juniata, Lackawanna, Schuylkill, Washington, and Wyoming. 

In the night’s biggest loss for an election denier, state judge Patricia McCullough fell short in her bid to join the state supreme court, losing in the GOP primary by seven percentage points.

McCullough gave Trump one of his brightest legal wins in late 2020 when she blocked the certification of state results, only to be quickly disavowed by the supreme court. “I was the only judge in the entire country to enter an order to halt the certification of the 2020 presidential election results,” she later said, boasting of her boost to “Stop the Steal” efforts.

Carolyn Carluccio, the Republican who defeated McCullough on Tuesday, has herself amplified false allegations of widespread voter fraud, telling a Republican audience that a bipartisan law that expanded mail-in voting in the state had undermined the integrity of elections. Carluccio did not answer a Bolts request for comment, and she also dodged a question on what she meant by the Philadelphia Inquirer.

Throughout the state, Tuesday’s elections were marked by relatively low turnout, as is typical for off-year elections. Roughly 820,000 Republicans voted in the judicial primary on Tuesday, which is just 60 percent of the electorate that participated in the GOP primaries 12 months ago. 

Carluccio will face Democratic nominee Daniel McCaffrey in November. The winner will sit on Pennsylvania’s supreme court and hear potential election cases during the 2024 cycle. Democrats will retain a majority on the court no matter the outcome, though a loss would narrow their edge to 4-3. This general election is expected to be highly competitive. 

But in the counties where GOP commissioners tried to block certification in recent years, most of the incumbents who won their primaries yesterday are likely to have a clear edge in November. Trump carried Berks, Fayette, and Lancaster counties by large margins in 2020. 

Still, there is recent history to suggest that Pennsylvania Democrats can be competitive in red-leaning territory when facing a far-right candidate; Berks swung blue last year in the governor’s race, which featured election denier Doug Mastriano as the Republican nominee. In each of these counties, the two Democratic and two Republican nominees will run on one ballot, and the top three vote-getters will become commissioners.

DeMarco, the fake Trump elector running for re-election in Allegheny County, is also highly likely to return for another term. Under Allegheny’s complex rules, Democrats and Republicans each nominate only one candidate to complete for two at-large council seats in the general election, so they’re each sure to win unless an independent also enters the race. Local election observers told Bolts that they are not aware of an independent running at this time, though the deadline for one to file is Aug. 1.

“Since it is these local officials who are responsible for administering our elections and certifying the results, it’s critical for Pennsylvanians to not only be aware of this dangerous trend spreading through their cities and counties, but to know who the officials are who could potentially be a threat to democracy,” says Jenna Lowenstein, executive director of Informing Democracy, an organization that released its own report on local officials in Pennsylvania and elsewhere who have amplified the Big Lie.

The results in Pennsylvania’s Republican primaries on Tuesday stood in marked contrast with those in Kentucky, the only other state with statewide elections this week.

Kentucky Secretary of State Michael Adams easily won the Republican primary, defeating two election deniers who’d spread false election conspiracies with 64 percent of the vote. Over his tenure, Adams partnered with Democratic Governor Andy Beshear to support election changes that made it easier for Kentuckians to vote early and to vote by mail.

“I’m really proud that Kentucky Republicans ratified the things that we’ve done to make voting easier at a time that other red states have gone backwards,” Adams told Bolts on Wednesday after his victory. “I’ve got hundreds of thousands of Republicans that use those mechanisms to their satisfaction, and I just didn’t think that they were going to punish me for that.”

Adams will face Buddy Wheatley, a former Democratic lawmaker who promises to champion reforms to increase turnout, in the general election.

In the run-up to the Republican primary, Adams denounced the spread of conspiracies about the 2020 elections and he himself framed this race as a referendum on election denialism. 

“I’ve seen my colleagues in the same job in other states try to feed the tiger,” he told Bolts. “I’ve seen them make decisions that I think were probably not good for their voters to try to survive a primary and all it does is just validate the conspiracy theories. You can’t cave.” He defended his decision to keep Kentucky in ERIC, a national consortium to clean voting rolls that a wave of GOP-led states have quit since the start of the year. 

Adams acknowledges that it may be easier to push back against the Big Lie in a state where Republicans already dominate, compared to a place like Pennsylvania where ”the stakes are higher.” But he cast election denialism as a national crisis, pointing to threats in places that aren’t as competitive in presidential elections such as Tennessee or New Mexico, where some GOP officials tried to block local certifications last year. 

“This is not a six state problem, it is a 50-state problem now,” he said.

The post Pennsylvania GOP Doubles Down on Election Deniers, Including a Fake Trump Elector appeared first on Bolts.

“It’s not just people questioning you at work. It’s at the grocery store, or at your niece’s birthday party,” she said. Her county covers an area almost as big as New Jersey but has a population of just over 6,700 people.

“I pretty much know everyone,” added Donaldson, a Democrat starting her fourth term in a county then-President Donald Trump won by 51 points in 2020. “They don’t trust us. We’re letting them watch the process, but you can’t really argue with those people that have believed misinformation. It doesn’t matter how long they’ve known you. They’ll say, we know you’re doing it the right way, but the county next door isn’t. Well, that doesn’t make you feel any better about your job.”

This relatively new stressor is part of the long tail of election denialism that was kicked off by Trump during the 2020 presidential election. It remains as an animating belief among some on the right that entire electoral systems—and the people who run them—are irredeemably untrustworthy.  

The constant harassment has been enough to force many in Donaldson’s field out of the profession. A 2021 Brennan Center national survey of election workers found that a third had been made to feel unsafe because of their work, while about one in six said they’d been outright threatened during the past election cycle.

In Nevada, it’s been felt acutely. The clerk of Washoe County (Reno), the second most populous county in the state, stepped down last year amid threats to herself and her office. The clerk of rural, deep-red Nye County also stepped down, because commissioners there voted to conduct ballot-counting by hand, and was replaced by a new clerk who has promoted election conspiracies. Clerks in tiny Lander and Mineral counties both resigned in late 2021.

Amid that turmoil last year, Nevada became a focal point for far-right efforts to overtake election administration. Jim Marchant, a Trump-endorsed election denier who echoed Nye County officials’ conspiracies against voting machines, ran for secretary of state in Nevada, while also taking a lead in coordinating a national slate of election deniers to run for the position in critical battleground states. Most lost in November, including Marchant. 

Despite Marchant’s loss, these pressures have still left election administration in Nevada in a challenging position. Now, about 40 percent of county clerks in the state are either brand new to their offices or, having taken over mid-term for a departed clerk, are serving their first complete terms. Some have never worked in elections before. 

The man who beat Marchant, Democratic Secretary of State Cisco Aguilar, has also never worked in elections. In an interview with Bolts last week, he indicated that he was getting up to speed on important questions about voting access for Native communities; engagement of eligible voters newly released from prison; and potential improvements to the state’s automatic voter registration system.

“The biggest challenge” Nevada faces, Aguilar said, is building and preserving a robust, institutionally knowledgeable elections workforce. 

“Making sure we have people wanting to work in election departments, people wanting to work at the polls,” he said. “If we don’t take care of the human component, 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.”

Nevada, like other states, has three major elections—presidential primary, general election primary and general election—in 2024.

“If people don’t feel safe going to work, they’re not going to work in these departments or on the polling sites,” Aguilar added.

Nonpartisan national elections experts generally rate Nevada’s voting systems above those of other states. It has in recent years distinguished itself from most of the rest of the country by offering universal, automatic mail voting; by implementing a modernized version of automatic voter registration; and by allowing same-day registration—among other policies.  

But workforce problems this state faces present a different type of challenge to election integrity that can’t be solved with voting procedure innovations alone. 

Aguilar is working to implement—ideally in time for 2024 elections, he said—a program that will take substantial administrative burden off of local election officials by centralizing the state’s voter registration information in a single database his office would maintain. At present, county offices must maintain their own databases and report up to the state, an arrangement which Donaldson, president of the Nevada Association of County Clerks and Election Officials said “we all have issues with.” Aguilar asked the legislature for $30 million to do this. So far the new governor, Republican Joe Lombardo, has supported the ask, Aguilar says.

The new secretary of state is also backing at least two new proposed laws this legislative session meant to protect election workers. One, Assembly Bill 59, would allow state election officials to shield their home addresses from public records; the other, expected but not yet filed, would make it a felony to threaten, harass or intimidate election workers. 

These proposals roughly mirror policies to discourage and punish harassment of election workers in other states, including Washington, Maine, and Colorado. These new laws have passed with bipartisan support, though advocates against mass criminalization have cautioned against the suggestion that new or harsher criminal penalties are appropriate solutions.

States Newsroom reported last year that in Washington, for example, the ACLU opposed a new law calling for up to five years of prison time in some cases, on the grounds that the state’s criminal code already allows for punishment of harassment—regardless of whether a victim is an election worker. And in Maine, criminal defense attorneys pointed to the fact that existing criminal penalties often do not actually deter criminal behavior.

Kerry Durmick, Nevada state director for the nonprofit voting rights group All Voting is Local, said they are skeptical of the proposal to increase criminal penalties.

“I’m not going to come out on this particular bill until we see the language,” Durmick said. “We don’t want it to go too far and have the effect of intimidating voters, or have a negative effect on criminal justice by creating a new felony. But we do want to protect election workers.”

Aguilar is convinced his policies are on target because, he said, similar ones in Colorado and other states are working. Matt Crane, who directs Colorado’s association of county clerks, said it’s not yet clear whether that is true. His state’s law only went into effect in June.

“I think it gives people some comfort knowing they’re protected. I think it’s too early to say how much,” he told Bolts. He added that the pressures on election officials that inspired the Colorado and Nevada legislation have died down a bit lately, but “there’s no question, with [Arizona’s losing gubernatorial candidate] Kari Lake running around with her absurdity, with Trump running for president, this stuff isn’t going to go away.”

Donaldson said she and other clerks in the state are on board with Aguilar’s agenda, and especially the new statewide registration database, but that she’s not sure legislation alone can cure what ails her profession. After all, she noted, no statehouse bill would extinguish misinformation, or seek to regulate the freedom of her constituents to bark at her in the grocery store.

“I don’t have that answer,” Donaldson added. “It’s hard because we try, with the help from the secretary of state’s office, to put out the correct information, but how do you make people believe it? I don’t know how we could do better at those kinds of things.”

She worries this trend will be especially taxing in rural communities, where misinformation and harassment are less often abstract or faceless because they come straight from neighbors. Her county, Pershing, is the type where multiple generations have been taught by the same local school teachers.

“It’s easier to ignore when you don’t know them,” Donaldson said. “But it’s every day now. It becomes a lot.”

The post “They Don’t Trust Us”: Nevada Election Workers Still Face Pressure and Harassment appeared first on Bolts.