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.

In 2020, as the world grappled with a deadly global pandemic, Connecticut officials lifted restrictions limiting who can vote by mail, allowing every citizen in the state to obtain an absentee ballot.

The results were historic: More than 650,000 Connecticut citizens voted absentee, roughly a third of all votes cast.

The liberalization of voting laws benefited everyone in the state who wanted to vote by mail, but the change particularly impacted those with disabilities. Researchers from Rutgers University and the U.S. Election Assistance Commission found that the “disability gap” in Connecticut—the gulf in turnout between voters who had disabilities and those who didn’t—was only 3.3 percent, compared to a national average of 5.7 percent that year.

“People with disabilities are more likely to vote when they have access to voting by mail,” said Douglas Kruse, the co-director of the Program for Disability Research at Rutgers University and one of the report’s authors.

But for the 2022 midterms, Connecticut reverted back, and voters once again needed to have an excuse if they wanted to vote by mail. The result was a disability turnout gap of roughly 11 percent—one of the highest in the country and significantly higher than that year’s national average of 1.5 percent. The turnout was “consistent with the idea that rolling back no-excuse absentee voting discouraged turnout among people with disabilities,” said Kruse. 

“It’s not that people with disabilities are less interested in voting,” he continued. It’s that “they face a variety of voting difficulties, everything from getting to the polls, to requesting ballots, to getting inside polling places.”

Mail voting could become easier if Connecticut voters approve a ballot initiative this November that would amend the state Constitution and create a path for everyone to acquire an absentee ballot without needing an excuse. If the proposal passes, it will be up to state legislators to put it into law. 

Should the initiative pass and lead to future legislation, Rutgers and the U.S. Election Assistance Commission’s research suggests it likely will lead to higher turnout among voters with disabilities. Between the 2018 and 2022 midterms, five states switched to a no-excuse system where anyone could vote by mail, leading to an almost seven percent increase in turnout among people with disabilities. 

“Just to have that ability to get that ballot, in your hands, no excuse needed, is just huge for people with disabilities,” said Carol Scully, director of advocacy for The Arc Connecticut. 

Currently, Connecticut is one of 14 states that require an excuse in order to vote absentee. The state’s Constitution only allows citizens to vote absentee for a handful of specific reasons, which include being sick or out of town on Election Day, or having a physical disability. Even so, not everyone with a disability qualifies for an absentee ballot, and those who must vote in person often have difficulty casting a ballot due to a myriad of possible issues at polling places.

The current statute allows voters with certain disabilities to obtain a permanent absentee ballot, meaning they receive a mail ballot for each election in which they’re eligible to vote. But first, they need to get a note from a doctor stating that they have a permanent physical disability and can’t get to the polls.

“It shouldn’t be on the person with disabilities to prove that they have a right to vote,” said Jess Zaccagnino, policy counsel for the ACLU of Connecticut, which is leading a campaign supporting the ballot initiative.

Existing law is also rigid about what disabilities qualify for an absentee ballot, said Gretchen Knauff, director of Disability Services for the City of New Haven. The statute only allows mail voting for citizens with physical disabilities preventing them from getting to the polls on Election Day, which Knauff said leaves out people with intellectual disabilities or mental health conditions.

“It’s basically treating voters who don’t have physical disabilities differently in the absentee balloting process,” she said. “You’re leaving out people who have disabilities other than physical, and making the assumption they don’t need a permanent absentee ballot.”

People with cognitive impairments are among those least likely to cast a ballot, according to research from Rutgers University and the U.S. Election Assistance Commission. Lisa Schur, co-director of the Program for Disability Research at Rutgers and one of the report’s authors, said some people with cognitive impairment resulting from a physical disability, like cerebral palsy, would likely qualify for an absentee ballot under Connecticut’s law, but, “it’s kind of a mushy line, so there are a lot of people with cognitive impairments who may not be counted.”

A coalition of voting rights advocates, including the ACLU and a Connecticut chapter of the NAACP, launched a campaign over the summer to build support for the ballot initiative. If the measure is successful, all registered voters would simply be able to request an absentee ballot before each election, and no longer need to navigate logistical hurdles like securing a doctor’s note. 

That means people with disabilities would be treated just like everyone else, said Knauff.

“There’s no barrier, except you have to do the same thing that everyone else has to do, which is request a no-excuse absentee ballot,” Knauff said. “You don’t have to spend your energy trying to prove you’re a person with a disability.”

Adopting the measure would put Connecticut in league with the majority of states that already have some level of no-excuse absentee voting. The proposal has broad support among Connecticut residents. A recent poll from the Connecticut Project Action Fund found that 60 percent of voters support expanding no-excuse absentee voting. 

Even if voters approve the constitutional amendment, it will be up to state legislators to make it law. Given that the measure was referred to the ballot by lawmakers, advocates are hopeful that they would make it a priority. Still, Zaccagnino cautioned, “There’s nothing stopping them from ignoring it.”

If legislators did have any hesitancy about enacting the measure, it could stem from a scandal over mail ballots that has embroiled Bridgeport in recent years, leading to the arrest of four political operatives this summer over the improper handling of absentee ballots during a 2019 Democratic primary. 

Even if Connecticut passes no-excuse absentee voting, advocates for people with disabilities don’t see it as a cure-all. People with disabilities who do decide to vote in person currently face an array of challenges at the polls, said Kasey Considine, supervisory attorney for Disability Rights Connecticut. Voters have reported a lack of parking spaces close to the entrance; doors that aren’t wide enough to fit a scooter or wheelchair; poll workers who aren’t properly trained on how to operate the state’s accessible voting machines, or who make the assumption that people with certain disabilities cannot vote. (The Connecticut Secretary of State’s office did not respond to Bolts’ questions about accessibility at polling locations.) 

“It’s incredibly insulting,” said Considine. 

In a 2022 video produced by Considine’s organization, Carly Bobenski recalled an Election Day where a poll worker asked her if she wanted to vote for her favorite farm animal. 

“My mother and I were really too shocked and embarrassed to say anything except that I had been voting for many years,” said Bobenski, who has cerebral palsy, is quadriplegic and relies on assistive technology to communicate. “By then people were already staring at me.”

The Americans with Disabilities Act requires polling places to provide accommodations for people with disabilities. Voters with disabilities should not need to tell anyone their condition to receive an accommodation. But in practice, Considine said many voters feel they must disclose personal health information to poll workers in order to get what they need to cast a ballot, as uncomfortable as it is.

“It can feel like you have to choose between your right to privacy and your right to vote,” Considine said.

Difficulties at polling stations are not unique to Connecticut. Research from Rutgers University and the U.S. Election Assistance Commission found that 20 percent of voters with a disability had trouble voting in person in the 2022 election, compared to 6 percent of those who voted by mail. 

But despite those challenges, Kruse said that about half of people with disabilities would still prefer to vote in person, as long as it’s accessible.

It is not enough, Considine said, for Connecticut voters with disabilities to have to rely on voting by mail because their polling place isn’t accessible enough. 

“Everyone should have that freedom to wait in line, cast their vote, fill out the ballot themselves and get that ‘I voted’ sticker,” she said. “I want to make sure that we still are mindful that disabled voters may still want to go in person, and we still have more work to make sure that is accessible.”

But if voting in person proves challenging for people with disabilities, Zaccagnino said, “no-excuse absentee voting also presents another avenue to vote if their needs aren’t being met by the state.”

This article is part of U.S. Democracy Day, a nationwide collaborative on Sept. 15, the International Day of Democracy, in which news organizations cover how democracy works and the threats it faces. To learn more, visit usdemocracyday.org.

The post Connecticut Ballot Measure Could Make Voting More Inclusive 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.

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.

—

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

When Oakland County Clerk Lisa Brown looks back on the nine days of early voting she administered in the lead-up to Michigan’s Nov. 7 local elections, she considers it not only a logistical success, but a good time for those working the polls.

The people who came out to cast ballots were especially pleasant, she recalls, and election workers got to run the polls without the pressure of long and crowded Election Days. 

The southeast Michigan county was one of ten throughout the state where some voters tried out in-person early voting this fall, a first in this state. The innovation was one of the key provisions of Proposal 2, a constitutional amendment that voters overwhelmingly approved last year that contained many other changes aimed at protecting and expanding ballot access, including mandating ballot drop boxes and funding postage for mail-in ballots.

With the entire state set to adopt in-person early voting in 2024, Brown and some other clerks took advantage of the lower-turnout races this year to try out early voting as a pilot program. 

“We’re glad to be that resource for others,” Brown said. “It will make it easier for other clerks next year that we can share our experience, advice and knowledge.”

In addition to adopting Prop 2 last year, Michigan voters delivered the state House and Senate to Democrats, and reelected Democratic Governor Gretchen Whitmer, giving the party its first trifecta control of the state government in 38 years. This came after several years of Republican legislators—many of them motivated by Trumpian voter fraud conspiracies—pushing for new voting restrictions, while others in the GOP played with overturning elections and ran for office on proposals to unwind the election system.

The newly-empowered Democrats, by contrast, made democracy legislation a priority. Powered by what voting access advocates are calling a “pro-voter” majority in the House and Senate, the legislature has passed a raft of new legislation that’s meant to make it easier for people to register and cast ballots, to shore up election systems, and to protect election workers.

“There was a call to action with the passage of Proposal 2,” said Democratic Representative Penelope Tsernoglou, who was elected to the House as part of this blue wave in 2022. “It was clear that people in Michigan wanted more voter access and wanted to support whatever we could do to…make voting easy, accessible, streamlined.” 

But key pieces of this agenda were left unfinished—including a state-level Voting Rights Act and a bill to end prison gerrymandering—and Democrats’ window of action to push them through may be closing just as quickly as it opened. The party finds itself in a very tight spot if they hope to pass more of it by next fall’s elections, when they risk losing control of the legislature.

The Michigan legislature adjourned for the year on Nov. 14, about a month earlier than usual, and when it returns Democrats will have lost their ability to pass legislation through the state House, likely through the middle of 2024. That’s because two Democrats are resigning from the House after winning mayoral races on Nov. 7, leaving the chamber evenly split between Democrats and Republicans until their blue districts hold special elections next year.

This puts pressure on 2024, a year that won’t just be a deadline for Michigan Democrats to complete their voting rights agenda, but also the first proving ground for some of their new elections measures, all against the backdrop of possible renewed efforts by Donald Trump to test the democratic system.

Kim Murphy-Kovalick, programs director of Voters Not Politicians, a group that organized to get Prop 2 on the ballot in 2022 and lobbied Lansing on voting rights this year, is glad to see so much legislation pass but acknowledges that there’s still much work to be done. 

“We have a pro-voter legislature but our majorities are very slim, and there are still elected officials who do not support these measures,” she told Bolts. “So while Michigan has made great gains in the last few years, we’re in a tenuous place.”

With the legislature set to adjourn earlier than expected this month, Michigan legislators worked right up to the end to pass a flurry of bills with the intended effect of reducing friction at nearly all points in the voting process, starting from registration. 

Michigan adopted automatic voter registration, a system in which the government uses existing points of interactions with residents to proactively register them, back in 2018, thanks to a different ballot proposition. But lawmakers on Nov. 8 passed a bill sponsored by Tsernoglou that would expand the state agencies tasked with automatically registering someone to vote. In addition to signing people up when they get or update a driver’s license, the state would also register them through interactions with Native American tribal nations, Medicaid applications (though this provision is contingent on a federal blessing) and the Department of Corrections. 

As Bolts reported last week, this is the first law in the nation under which people leaving prison would be automatically registered to vote. 

Lawmakers also passed a bill that would allow 16 and 17-year-olds to preregister, so that they’re already on the rolls to cast votes once they become eligible at 18. Proponents of this reform, which already exists in some form in 25 other states, say that it helps build civic habits early, and encourages turnout among young voters. Both of these voter registration bills now await Whitmer’s signature. (Editor’s note: Whitmer signed both bills into law on Nov. 30.)

Whitmer signed another bill this month that repealed the state’s ban on paid rides to the polls. This unusual restriction, defended by the GOP, threatened outside groups with criminal charges if they paid to transport people to the polls, limiting get-out-the-vote methods used elsewhere.

Another law that she signed would change the rules for ballot challenges so that votes cast by people who register on the day of the election are no longer automatically entered in “challenged” status, which delays ballot processing. Tsernoglou says this rule benefits voters in college towns like Ann Arbor and East Lansing, where many students use same-day voter registration. 

HB 4570, meanwhile, will allow voters to request absentee ballot applications online, codifying and make permanent a process that Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson has already put in place.

Still other legislation passed during this final sprint focused on protecting against false information on the campaign trail, and protecting voting procedures and election workers. One set of bills, also sponsored by Tsernoglou, would require disclaimers on campaign ads produced with AI technology, in an attempt to combat “deepfakes,” digitally-manipulated content that’s increasingly being used to spread political disinformation.

Other reforms would clarify that only the state supreme court may contest the results of a presidential election, and establish a process candidates must follow to petition for judicial review; lawmakers passed those bills to deter frivolous lawsuits of the sort that Trump’s campaign filed in Michigan in the aftermath of the 2020 election. All of these measures also await Whitmer’s signature. 

Lawmakers also passed a bill, now on Whitmer’s desk, that would make harassing or intimidating an election worker a crime, up to a felony. (Editor’s note: Whitmer signed this bill and the ones mentioned in the prior paragraph on Nov. 30.) With it, Michigan would join a growing list of states passing laws that have created new criminal charges for people who harass election workers since the 2020 election and its aftermath, which has seen election workers nationwide complain of threats they’ve received.

Where these laws have been proposed, though, some criminal justice reform advocates have raised concerns about the strategy of creating new criminal charges, objecting to measures that increase the footprint of the prison system and pointing out that such measures may needlessly pile onto existing anti-harassment laws. 

Earlier this year, Michigan Democrats already adopted another package of landmark reforms meant to implement and fund provisions of Prop 2: These measures established the modalities of early voting, detailed municipality drop box requirements, and codified a system for online absentee ballot tracking. It also allowed voters to sign up on a list to receive mail ballots every cycle, without having to ask for them again.

Whitmer signed this package into law in July. 

Brown, the Oakland County clerk, sees the changes brought about by Prop 2 as sorely needed. “From a voting rights perspective, I’d say we finally caught up to a lot of other states,” she said. “We were lacking and lagging for way too long.”

Brown served two terms as a Democrat in the state House from 2009 to 2012, when the legislature was either split or under Republican control. She recalls how difficult it was then to pass voting rights legislation. 

“You couldn’t get some of these issues through,” Brown told Bolts. “It took citizens to get together and say, ‘If the legislature can’t do this, we’re gonna do it.’ And that’s how we got those ballot proposals. So I think we made a lot of really good progress.”

When Democrats took control of Lansing last year for the first time since the 1980s, they were meant to have a two-year stint in power. But their narrow 56-54 majority in the state House has been thrown into question: Representatives Kevin Coleman and Lori Stone decided to run for mayor in their respective hometowns of Westland and Warren, and they’ll now leave their office early since they prevailed in those mayoral elections on Nov. 7.

Democrats feel confident they’ll eventually regain a working majority once Coleman and Stone’s seats are filled, since both come from solidly-blue districts. But these special elections may take a while to organize. 

Speaker Joe Tate doused some Democrats’ hope that the specials would happen in February to coincide with the state’s presidential primary, telling Bridge Michigan that he doesn’t “see that as feasible.” Bridge Michigan reports that special elections may be held in May, or even as late as August to coincide with another statewide primary. The final decision lies with Whitmer. (Update on Nov. 27: Whitmer has scheduled primaries for both seats on Jan. 30, with general elections to follow on April 16.)

In the meantime, there may be five to eight months in which Michigan has a Senate under Democratic control, but a House divided 54-54 between Democrats and Republicans—a situation that some observers are already calling a recipe for partisan gridlock. 

Advocates in the state are nervous that, by the time the specials are held, especially if they’re in August, lawmakers’ attention will have shifted to running for reelection in the November races. 

And there’s a lot else that they were asking of lawmakers. Murphy-Kovalick of Voters Not Politicians was hoping they’d pass a bill banning people from carrying guns within 100 feet of polling locations and county boards. 

“It’s very disappointing that banning weapons at polling locations didn’t make it across the finish line,” Murphy-Kovalick said, “because open carry of weapons at polling locations is a voter intimidation tactic that has been used in the past, and we would like to avoid that next year.” The bill passed the House but did not make it out of the Senate this year. 

Another reform that stalled this year was a proposed Michigan Voting Rights Act, intended to prevent racial discrimination in voting. At least six states have passed such measures in recent years in order to fill in voter protection gaps that have been left by the recent court decisions that weakened the federal Voting Rights Act, explains Aseem Mulji, legal counsel at the Campaign Legal Center, a national organization that advocates for voting rights and endorsed the Michigan proposal. 

“There is a common-sense response to the erosion of voting rights at the federal level; states have the power to pass their own VRAs,” he said. “You don’t have to just rely on the federal law. It’s sort of baffling that the idea has just begun to catch on.”

Michigan’s proposed VRA, which didn’t pass either chamber this year, is designed to do just this. One provision would require local governments to get preclearance from the secretary of state or from a state court before making certain voting changes, which would mirror a key section of the federal VRA that was gutted by the U.S. Supreme Court in 2013. The package also includes provisions to protect Michigan’s minority groups; for example requiring voting materials to be translated into Arabic and other languages from the Middle East and North Africa, in service of the many people from those regions living in the state. 

“It’s worth acknowledging that the state’s taken really tremendous strides towards improving access and freedom to vote,” said Mulji. “And this is really a way to protect the progress the state has made against future backsliding, by saying, ‘we won’t allow you to backslide on any protections to the extent that they result in racial discrimination.’” 

Another missed opportunity to shore up voting equity was a bill to end prison gerrymandering. In Michigan, as in most states, people incarcerated in state prisons don’t have the right to vote but, for the purposes of drawing electoral districts, are counted as part of the population where the prison is located rather than where their last address before being incarcerated. This inflates the political power of small, rural areas where prisons tend to be located at the expense of more urban and more diverse areas that tend to suffer a heavier incarceration rate.

The Michigan Senate first took up the issue in September with a hearing in the Ethics and Elections Committee, but the legislation did not advance. For now, Michigan won’t join the other 11 states including Colorado and Virginia that have ended prison gerrymandering. 

Murphy-Kovalick doesn’t expect the VRA package or the prison gerrymandering bill to pass a tied House next year. But Tsernoglou doesn’t necessarily think that the next few months will be time lost. 

“We really need to have some time to do our work in our offices of getting bills drafted and introduced,” she said. “I think this is absolutely fine for us to have this time right now and it’s also a really great opportunity for us to figure out what we can do on a bipartisan basis.” 

She acknowledges that it’s been hard to generate bipartisan consensus on election legislation but thinks it’s still possible. 

Whatever happens with the rest of Democrats’ agenda Michigan voters will go into 2024 with stronger protections and easier access to the ballot than they’ve had in past years, and other states are already eying Lansing as a blueprint on how to strengthen democracy. But Murphy-Kovalick also warns that next year could be Democrats’ last opportunity for a while to build on their recent work.

“There are some other things that, if we end up losing a pro-voter majority moving forward, might not ever see the light of day,” said Murphy-Kovalick. “So we’re hoping to get some of these across the finish line next year to make sure that everything is in place to protect our elections, not only in 2024, but moving beyond that.” 

The post Michigan Democrats Sprint Through ‘Pro-Voter’ Agenda to Close Out 2023 appeared first on Bolts.

Bob Harvie was thrust on the national stage in late 2020 when Donald Trump, in an effort to find any angle to cling to the presidency, unsuccessfully sued Bucks County, a populous suburb of Philadelphia, demanding that thousands of mail ballots be thrown out. 

As one of the two Democrats on the three-member county commission, Harvie was responsible for the county’s voting procedures and he wanted people to vote safely during the pandemic. With his support, Bucks County installed ballot drop boxes and notified roughly 1,600 voters that they had made a clerical mistake on their mail ballot such as forgetting to date their envelopes, giving them the opportunity to correct it—a common procedure known as ballot curing.

“The Republican Party and the Trump campaign wanted things done a certain way, we didn’t do things the way they wanted to, so they sued us. Clearly we’d followed the law because we won all these suits,” recalls Harvie, who is running for reelection in two weeks. The race will determine what party controls Bucks County’s commission during the next presidential election.

Democrats gained control of the commission in 2019 for the first time in decades, one of five flips in eastern Pennsylvania counties with more than 2 million residents combined. The results gave Democrats near total control of the ring of counties around Philadelphia. Their new majorities approved relatively expansive voting procedures, and in late 2020 they effectively created a suburban firewall against Trump’s efforts to get officials in blue counties to throw out ballots and resist certifying the results. 

Pennsylvania leaves county officials with a lot of discretion to decide how to run elections. They have tremendous leeway in particular when it comes to deciding the modalities of voting by mail. The state provides little binding guidance on whether a county needs to have a ballot drop box, let alone how many drop boxes to have or how accessible they should be. County officials also decide whether to notify voters whose ballot risks being rejected because of a minor mistake. 

This has produced a disconcerting patchwork of policies. “You can have boards of elections that are 15 minutes apart and yet the rules are so different,” says Kadida Kenner, executive director of New PA Project, an organization that focuses on boosting voter registration and turnout. 

In the lead-up to the 2020 and 2022 elections, many counties adopted more restrictive rules, including not installing drop boxes and not letting voters correct mistakes on their envelopes. The decisions did not always fall neatly on partisan lines, and voting rights organizations have targeted Democratic boards for tossing out too many ballots, including in the city of Philadelphia. But, by and large, Republican politicians since 2020 have been more likely to oppose procedures that facilitate mail voting. Even Dauphin County (the bluest county under GOP control) has not allowed ballot curing, offering a glimpse into what the voter-rich suburban ring around Philadelphia would have looked like had Democrats not made major gains in 2019.

Harvie points to the rules in place in other parts of Pennsylvania to lay out the stakes of his county’s Nov. 7 elections. 

“If Republicans are in control of the board of elections in 2024,” he told Bolts, “I don’t have any doubt that a lot of the things we put in place will be gone.” 

If the county reversed its approach on curing, he says, officials would likely reject thousands of mail ballots without first reaching out to voters to say there was an issue with their ballot. “The dangerous part is that people won’t know that their votes aren’t counted,” he says. “You’re gonna think, ‘Oh, I guess I voted, I didn’t do anything wrong.’ You wouldn’t even know that you had been denied.”

Voters in other counties will also be deciding the shape of their county governments on Nov. 7, which means that they’ll also be choosing who will run next year’s elections in this critical swing state—and under what policy. 

Republicans could flip closely divided counties like Bucks, but they’ll also test Democratic gains in counties like Chester that have swung dramatically blue since 2019 after staying faithful to Republicans for decades in local elections. Democrats, meanwhile, have some opportunities to gain ground, for instance in Dauphin and Berks. 

The results will shape how easy it is for millions of Pennsylvanians to vote—especially by mail—and the odds that their ballot will be rejected. 

“If newly elected county governments in Pennsylvania remove drop boxes, if they remove the ability for voters to cure their ballots, they’ll make it even harder for eligible voters to have the votes counted,” said Philip Hensley-Robin, executive director of Common Cause Pennsylvania, a nonpartisan organization that promotes wider access to voting. 

“That could impact tens or hundreds of thousands of voters in the 2024 election and change the result of the election,” Hensley-Robin added.

The results will also inform which counties are susceptible to not certify next year’s elections. Plenty of commissioner candidates who’ve amplified Trump’s false claims of widespread irregularities advanced past the GOP primaries, often in staunchly red counties, Bolts reported in May. 

Among them are Christian Leinbach and Michael Rivera, the two Republican commissioners who run Berks County, a jurisdiction of more than 400,000 people located 50 miles west of Bucks County. Last year, they refused to certify their county’s election results because they wanted to exclude some valid mail ballots from their counts; a state court ultimately forced them to certify the results.

Leinbach and Rivera are now facing Democratic challengers Jesse Royer and Dante Santoni, who told Bolts in separate interviews that they’re worried about 2024: They think the GOP incumbents, if they remain in control, could once again placate election deniers next year and try to toss out results.

“The most important thing is that we have a board of commissioners that endorses the winner of a campaign,” Santoni told Bolts. “When the election is over, we accept the results. We think that that distinguishes us from our opponents. We talk about a lot of issues—roads, economic development—but without democracy, all those issues don’t mean a whole lot.” 

Leinbach and Rivera did not reply to requests for comment. GOP commissioners are also running for reelection in Fayette and Lancaster counties after similarly stalling certification of the 2022 primaries.

Royer and Santoni, the Democratic challengers in Berks, also laid out how they would ease mail voting. Both want to notify voters if their ballots have an error; Berks County’s Republican commissioners defeated a motion earlier this year for the county to provide such information to voters. “We need to make sure that people who are trying to cast their ballots are given every opportunity to do so,” Royer said.

Both Democrats also want to increase the number of ballot drop boxes set up in the county; Royer pointed out that it’s critical to make them widely accessible given that the county has poor public transportation. Both also oppose the county’s current policy, unusual in this state, of stationing armed sheriff’s deputies at ballot boxes; they warn that this may intimidate some voters, a position that Common Cause and other civil rights groups share. 

Unlike in Berks County, voters in Bucks County currently do not have to interact with armed law enforcement to cast a ballot. Harvie, the Democratic commissioner, says he wants to keep it that way. 

Harvie also worries that Bucks County could go the way of Berks County in terms of objections to election certification. He stresses that the Bucks County Republican Party is chaired by Pat Poprik, who became a false presidential elector for Trump in December 2020 and has clout over local GOP politics. Conservatives have recently taken the county by storm with major upheavals to local public schools via book bans and restrictions on LGBTQ+ students, and Democrats are tying these far-right gains on local school boards to the commissioner race.

The Republican candidate who is vying to join and flip Bucks County’s commission, County Controller Pamela Van Blunk, did not reply to a request for comment.

Voting rights attorneys in Pennsylvania told Bolts that they are less anxious about counties not certifying results than they are about thousands of mail ballots being tossed, since state courts are likely to intervene in the former scenario. County officials are not meant to have discretion to reject valid results, says Marian Schneider, who works on voting rights policy at the ACLU of Pennsylvania. She says that their task is merely “ministerial,” but that the ACLU will be vigilant. 

Still, Hensley-Robin of Common Cause is worried that Trump, should he be the GOP’s presidential nominee in 2024, would seek to weaponize delays and confusion in a replay of 2020. “When we see individual counties delaying certification or messing with voting machines, that spreads distrust in the election system, and that builds misinformation, which can result in moving to overturn an election,” he says.

Another fake Trump elector, Sam DeMarco, is currently a county commissioner in Allegheny County, Pennsylvania’s second most populous county. He holds an at-large seat that’s effectively reserved for the GOP, which makes it certain he will win a new term on Nov. 7. Should Republicans also win the unusually heated race for county executive, this would give them control of the county’s board of elections, which is made up of the county executive and the two at-large members. 

The Republican nominee for county executive, Joe Rockey, has distanced himself from Trump. But any small voting policy change in this populous county—where Biden won 150,000 more votes than Trump, double his statewide margin—would have important ramifications in 2024.

Pennsylvania in 2019 enacted Act 77, a bipartisan law that greatly expanded the availability of mail voting, but it did not set statewide guidelines for how counties should approach vital questions related to mail-in voting, including how to deal with clerical errors made by voters. Schneider regrets, for instance, that “there really is nothing in the election code that addresses what happens if a mistake has been made on the outer envelope.” 

State courts have stepped into this void since 2020, but in ways that have only compounded the importance of what county officials decide with regards to ballot curing. 

For one, Republicans have won legal battles ensuring that mail ballots with small errors will get tossed if they aren’t fixed in time; in the lead-up to the 2022 midterms, the supreme court ordered officials not to count a ballot if the voter forgot to write a date, even if the ballot arrived on time. “There are new things that can disqualify you,” Hensley-Robin warns. Due to this higher standard, he says, thousands of ballots risk being tossed in 2024 that would not have been in 2020—unless voters get to cure them first.

Pennsylvanians are also electing a new state supreme court justice this fall, with the two candidates staking very different opinions on how permissive courts should be toward mail voting.

Moreover, courts have confirmed that there is no statewide rule regarding whether counties must help voters correct their mistakes. In 2022, they rejected a Republican lawsuit demanding that all counties stop the practice of ballot curing altogether. The decision was a relief for voting rights advocates since it meant boards could still choose to let voters cure their ballots, but it also entrenched the current status quo that  leaves the matter entirely to counties’ discretion.

Advocates for ballot access are deeply frustrated that the state has been reduced to this mosaic of disparate policies. Policies should not differ so starkly from one county to the next when it comes to the ease of mail voting, they say. “This patchwork from county to county really confuses voters and makes them unsure of the rules in the system,” says Hensley-Robin.

Kenner, of New PA Project, says this fragmentation also stands as a big obstacle for organizations like hers that are working on the ground to drive up turnout. 

“It gets very confusing for a statewide organization to be able to subscribe to the various rules that board of elections have in each county,” she told Bolts. “As we’re preparing to do our GOTV efforts, we have to make sure that all scripts are different for each county… It also makes it tough when we’re doing voter registration, and we’re dropping off completed voter registration forms to various boards of elections and they all have different rules.”

For Hensley-Robin, the remedy cannot just be persuading individual county commissioners throughout the state of Pennsylvania to ease ballot access. He is advocating for the state to adopt House Bill 847, which would impose new statewide mandates, for instance when it comes to guaranteeing that counties give all voters a chance to correct their ballots. 

“Ballots should not be disqualified for failure to meet a clerical or technical standard,” says Hensley-Robin. “If voters make a small mistake in terms of failing to date a ballot or put a signature or have a secrecy envelope, they should have an opportunity to fix those. There needs to be a requirement for all counties to notify voters actively within 24 hours of receipt about one of these defects so that they have an opportunity to cure it immediately.”

Without such mandates, the Nov. 7 elections have graver stakes than anyone wishes on them.

“Where you live shouldn’t determine whether you have an opportunity to have your vote counted,” he added.

The post Pennsylvanians Are About to Decide Who Will Oversee the 2024 Elections appeared first on Bolts.

In a decision that landed days before the 2022 midterms, the Pennsylvania Supreme Court ordered elections officials not to count any mail ballots on which a voter had forgotten to include a date or scribbled an incorrect one, even if those ballots arrived on time. It was a victory for Republicans who had challenged the state’s mail voting procedures, and voting rights advocates found thousands of Pennsylvanians whose ballots were tossed as a result.

The court was one vote short of ruling that rejecting these ballots would violate federal protections, and thus should be counted; it split evenly on that question, 3 to 3. The tie-breaking vote would have come from Max Baer, the court’s Democratic chief justice, but he had died just weeks before. His death weakened a court majority keen to protect voting rights, and his seat has remained vacant ever since. 

Pennsylvanians in November will finally fill Baer’s seat, just one year before the 2024 presidential race. The result could substantially affect the future of election law in this key swing state, with new cases likely looming over mail voting, redistricting, and election certification. 

“There are a large number of open questions about Pennsylvania’s elections that are almost assuredly heading to the Pennsylvania Supreme Court in 2024” Victoria Bassetti, senior counsel at States United Democracy Center, a nonpartisan group that advocates for ballot access, told Bolts. “The experience of the last three years proves that every single one of those issues is hard-fought in the supreme court.” 

“Whoever is elected to this seat will have a critical voice in those decisions—and maybe even the deciding voice,” Bassetti said.

The candidates in the Nov. 7 race have signaled they’d take election law in different directions, in the state that saw more election lawsuits in 2020 than any other.

Democrats have a 4-2 majority on the court, down from 5-2 before Baer’s death, so they are sure to keep their edge this fall no matter the result of November’s election. But decisions from this court don’t always fall on party lines, as illustrated by the 2022 mail voting case.

Plus, the terms of three sitting Democratic justices end in 2025. If the GOP narrows its deficit this year, it would set Republicans up to only need to flip one of those seats to regain a majority later this decade. 

The election pits Democrat Daniel McCaffery, a judge on the Pennsylvania Superior Court, one of the state’s intermediate appellate courts, against Republican Carolyn Carluccio, a judge on the Montgomery County Court of Common Pleas, a local trial court. In the GOP primary, Carluccio bested Patricia McCullough, the only judge in the country to side with then-President Donald Trump’s efforts to halt ballot certification in 2020. 

That GOP primary result was yet another defeat this year for candidates with overt ties to election denialism, but Carluccio herself has dabbled in election conspiracy. She claimed at a campaign event in the spring that election procedures in Pennsylvania were inviting suspicions on fraud.

“We should be able to go to the polls and understand that our vote counts and understand that there’s not going to be some hanky-panky going on in the back,” she said, despite the lack of any evidence of widespread fraud in the state ever since Trump waged those accusations in 2020 

Carluccio made those comments in the context of criticizing Act 77, a bipartisan law that broadly  expanded ballot access in Pennsylvania in 2019. Before Act 77, Pennsylvanians were required to vote in person unless they could demonstrate a special reason, like illness, to qualify for an absentee ballot. But Act 77 legalized vote-by-mail for anyone who wanted that option—and millions of voters, mostly Democrats, quickly took advantage of this new convenience during the pandemic. 

Still, Trump’s camp and other Republicans denounced it in 2020 as part of their efforts to overturn election results, arguing that the state constitution required in-person voting on Election Day, and the state supreme court upheld the law in a 5-2 party-line decision.

Carluccio appeared to invite critics of the law to bring a new challenge to Act 77 if she is elected. “I would welcome that to come up before me again, let’s put it that way,” she said at the same spring event. “I can tell you that Act 77 has been very bad for our commonwealth.”

Asked by The Philadelphia Inquirer after the event whether she believes election results in 2020 and 2022 were “free and fair,” she dodged the question: “If even one Pennsylvanian has concerns about our electoral process, we must address them,” she said. 

In an exchange with Bolts this week, her campaign sounded a different note. Asked if she thought the results of the 2020 and 2022 elections were legitimate, Carluccio simply said in a statement emailed by her campaign, “Yes.”

But she also seemed to suggest that voter concerns about fraud inform her own approach to voting procedures. She reiterated her concern about mail voting, criticizing the court she hopes to join for giving “inconsistent and conflicting” guidance on the matter of ballot-dating. 

“I’ve heard from Democrat, Republican and Independent voters across the Commonwealth and many have concerns about the security of our elections, albeit differing concerns,” she said in the written statement. “I believe bold transparency in the administration of our elections is vital, paired with consistent application of our election laws regardless of the election year.” 

McCaffery, the Democratic candidate, told Bolts in an interview by phone that he would not comment directly on legal challenges to Act 77, since he expects he may have to rule on that law  in the future. But he articulated his stance on voting rights generally: “If we’re going to err, we should always err on the side of including votes, as opposed to disqualifying votes for technicalities, or perceived technicalities,” he said. 

McCaffery added, “I think it’s pretty crystal clear: The bedrock principle behind American democracy is ‘one person, one vote.’ If that’s what we really believe, then we should be looking for ways to encourage participation.”

A former prosecutor in the 1990s who joined the bench in 2003, McCaffery has been close to the state Democratic Party, including sitting on the Pennsylvania Democratic State Committee. He’s also signaled proximity with conservative jurisprudence, though, saying in a 2019 questionnaire that John Roberts was the U.S. Supreme Court Justice closest to his judicial philosophy, over those of liberal justices listed on the questionnaire such as Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Elena Kagan. 

A win by McCaffery would keep Democrats ahead 5-2; the margin would narrow to 4-3 if Carluccio flips the seat. The next election will be held in 2025, when three Democrats are set to face retention races—up-or-down contests where voters say whether a judge should stay on the court. 

Retention elections are rarely big news: Only once, in 2005, has a sitting justice lost. But supreme court elections have been much more closely watched as of late, and national records for spending in a judicial race were smashed this spring in Wisconsin. 

One or more of the justices could also choose to not seek a new term, in which case there’d be a regular election to replace them in 2025, offering the GOP a far more direct shot to flip seats and the court. Christine Donohue, one of these justices, will turn 73 in 2025, just two years away from Pennsylvania’s mandatory retirement age for judges.

The last time the court flipped, to Democrats in 2015, it paved the way for a landmark ruling in 2018 that struck down the state’s Republican gerrymanders and helped Democrats win control of the U.S. House in the 2018 midterms. The winner of the election between Carluccio and McCaffery would serve through at least 2033 and would be set to hear any redistricting lawsuits that arise from the next round of map-drawing.

“I consider voting rights to be the most important issue going on,” said Dan Fee, a Pennsylvania political consultant who ran a super PAC that supported the Democratic judicial candidates in the 2015 elections. “We have a supreme court that cares that people vote and that votes are counted. We’d like to keep that.”

McCaffery told Bolts he applauded the court’s 2018 decision to invalidate the previous GOP gerrymander. “The old ways of doing things—I don’t think that’s fair,” he said.

In addition to gerrymandering and lawsuits over Act 77 and over ballot-dating, the court was also responsible for resolving key legal disputes in the immediate aftermath of the 2020 election. In one instance that November, the court reversed a lower court’s decision to halt certification of state elections results; in another, it reversed a lower court’s decision forcing local election officials to allow observers to watch ballot-counting from six feet away. 

In all, the Pennsylvania Supreme Court’s string of rulings enabled vote-counting to proceed on schedule. Voting rights advocates felt the state’s democracy had passed an important test.

It will be tested again, they say.

“People can get burnt out on it being the apocalypse every time,” said Kyle Miller, who recently authored a report for the nonprofit organization Protect Democracy on legal challenges in Pennsylvania. “This court oversees the real, basic infrastructure of our electoral process. It’s really important that the folks ruling on these cases support democracy and recognize that voters want their voices heard.” 

Pennsylvania’s supreme court race has also drawn attention for its stakes for abortion rights, with Democrats now hammering the message that making state courts lean left is a critical response to the U.S. Supreme Court overturning Roe vs. Wade in 2022.

Carluccio, who has said she identifies most closely with the judicial philosophy of Antonin Scalia, the late U.S. Supreme Court justice widely admired by conservatives, featured anti-abortion language on her website before deleting it earlier this year, Politico reported. McCaffery has said he disagrees with the Dobbs decision and that he believes “from a personal standpoint” that “those particular issues are best decided between a woman, her conscience and her doctor.” 

The GOP cannot change abortion rights in coming years, since they will not run the state government until at least 2026. Still, Fee says, “The threat about (reproductive) choice may not be immediate but it is there; at some point we’ll have a different governor and legislature.” 

But he and other Pennsylvania observers said the stakes of this election are more immediately high for voting rights issues, considering the heap of recent and current litigation around state elections.

“What this court is ruling on really does go to the heart of election administration,” Miller said. “The process of canvassing votes, of certifying an election—these things that used to be niche topics are now life and death.”

This article is part of U.S. Democracy Day, a nationwide collaborative on Sept. 15, the International Day of Democracy, in which news organizations cover how democracy works and the threats it faces. To learn more, visit usdemocracyday.org.

The post Different Futures For Pennsylvania Elections Collide in November’s Supreme Court Race appeared first on Bolts.

But even with all these hurdles, a cadre of advocates, nonprofits, churches, and community-minded elected officials have shown up year after year for decades, working hard to protect the right to participate in democracy—especially for Black and other minority voters, who are often the most affected by voting restrictions. 

“We have organizations across the state that are part of the Civic Engagement Roundtable that’s organized by One Voice,” said Representative Zakiya Summers, a Democrat in the state house, referencing a Jackson nonprofit focused on policy advocacy. “These organizations are on conference calls every month. They have created voting rights guides and information that partner organizations can distribute in their community to get people educated and engaged.”

In the lead-up to this year’s primary elections in August, these advocates were gearing up to contend with the latest obstacle that Mississippi’s Republican-controlled legislature had thrown their way: Senate Bill 2358. The bill, which passed in the spring and went into effect on July 1, prohibits anyone from assisting another voter in handling and returning a mail-in ballot unless they are an immediate family or household member, a caregiver, or authorized election worker or mail carrier. Anyone caught violating the law could face up to a year in county jail and a fine of up to $3000.

Mississippi Governor Tate Reeves praised the bill when he signed it into law, saying that it would protect against “ballot harvesting,” or the practice of collecting ballots en masse, a fear that is central to the unfounded conspiracies about voter fraud that conservatives around the country latched onto since the 2020 election.

Despite a lack of evidence of widespread ballot harvesting or other fraud in Mississippi elections, the bill has threatened to limit the number of volunteers and advocates involved in get-out-the-vote efforts from sending or retrieving ballots on behalf of voters they don’t live with. More importantly, it could impede ballot access for people who count on this kind of assistance. 

“It just seemed like another barrier that would prevent people with disabilities from being able to vote autonomously,” says Jane Walton, the communications officer for Disability Rights Mississippi, which includes voting access among their advocacy work. “The bill in question dealt with whether or not someone can have a person assist them. Really, it’s an issue of whether a person with a disability has the autonomy to choose to vote in a way that is most accessible to them.”

Soon after it was passed, groups including Disability Rights Mississippi and Mississippi’s League of Women Voters sued the state in federal court to block the law, stating it “impermissibly restricts voters with disabilities from having a person of their choice assist them in submitting their completed mail-in absentee ballots.” On July 26, a federal judge sided with them and temporarily blocked the law, saying it disenfranchised voters with disabilities and violated the Voting Rights Act.

The decision blocked enactment of SB 2358 just in time for the Aug. 8 primary, and will also prevent it from taking effect ahead of the general election in November, when Mississippians will vote on nearly every major office, including governor and lieutenant governor, secretary of state, and representatives in both legislative chambers. Polling indicates that Republican incumbents who supported the bill—including the embattled Reeves, and Attorney General Lynn Fitch—are favored to win in this deep red state.

But no matter who people cast their vote for, advocates are more concerned about some residents being able to cast a vote at all. The suspension of SB 2358 offers some temporary relief, but these advocates fear that the threat of similar legislation still looms.

“For the past two years, we’ve been monitoring legislation that [has]pretty much been pushed by the Secretary of State every year to deal with ballot harvesting, Jarvis Dortch, Executive Director of the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) in Mississippi, told Bolts. ”That makes it harder to return a ballot by absentee, especially individuals with disabilities.”

Before the passage of this bill, advocates already had their hands full navigating existing restrictions that make it harder for citizens to vote, and for Black candidates to win. 

The state requires eligible voters to register 30 days before elections, one of the earliest deadlines in the country. This means that often, advocates must find eligible voters early, and educate them on the importance of registering long before there’s any major discussion of elections in the media, because there’s no early voting or same-day registration options as a backup. And advocates must repeat this process every year thanks to Mississippi’s odd-year elections. 

But in order to even register, eligible voters must comply with a stringent voter ID law, passed in 2011 by way of a ballot initiative that established a strict list of acceptable forms of ID, including a birth certificate, firearms permit, driver’s license, college ID card, US passport, tribal ID, or Voter ID card. 

“Voter ID targeted vulnerable populations who may not have access to ID or may not have access to a birth certificate so they can get an ID. The law was written so strongly that the state was willing to provide a free Voter ID,” says Summers.

Voting absentee by mail is also an involved process in Mississippi. As opposed to the majority of states, which offer no-excuse absentee voting, mail ballots are only available to populations with qualifying characteristics, including those living out-of-state, students, people with disabilities, people over 65, and certain others. Absentee ballots must be postmarked by election day to be counted. 

“We make it harder than anyone else to get folks registered and make it hard for people to vote absentee,” said Dortch. We don’t provide early voting. Now, instead of making it easier for folks to vote, we’re trying to get people off the voting rolls… and make it harder for people to actually vote absentee. When we have one of the hardest processes to vote absentee in the country. It doesn’t make sense.” 

Mississippi has also had a longtime a lifelong ban on voting for people convicted of certain types of felonies, a policy which has disenfranchised nearly 130,000 Black voters, or 16 percent of the state’s adult Black population. It’s one of only three states, alongside Tennessee and Virginia, where anyone stripped of voting rights loses it for their whole life. They can only regain it if they receive an exceedingly rare pardon from the legislature or the governor.

A federal appeals court this summer struck down that system as unconstitutional, calling it a “cruel and unusual punishment,” and denouncing Mississippi as “an outlier among its sister states, bucking a clear and consistent trend in our Nation against permanent disenfranchisement.” The state appealed the decision in late August, and the rights of hundreds of thousands of Mississippians are still hanging in the balance.

Perhaps unsurprisingly given all these restrictions, Mississippi has one of the lowest voter turnout rates in the country. In the 2022 midterms, Mississippi ranked eighth from last, with roughly 46 percent of voters showing up. And turnout for non-white voters was even lower.

Democrats and progressives have historically championed an increase in access to voting options in the state, and have in turn looked to Black and other disenfranchised voters for support in elections. This upcoming race is no exception. Democrat gubernatorial candidate Brandon Presley, for example, is betting on bases of support in majority-Black enclaves around the capital city of Jackson, as well as pockets of white and immigrant progressive and moderate voters scattered around the Mississippi Delta in his long-shot bid to oust Tate Reeves.

Ty Pinkins, the Democratic candidate for secretary of state, is a recent addition after previous candidate Shuwaski Young dropped out of the race for health reasons. While Pinkins has limited time to build name recognition before the contest, he’s hoping that a campaign message of easing the state’s restrictive voting laws will connect with voters.

“Making sure people can register to vote online makes sense, making sure that we have a way for people to do early voting—that makes sense, and not restricting access to the ballot for people with disabilities,” Pinkins told Mississippi Today. 

SB 2358 remains on hold until further hearings are held and a final decision is handed down. And while advocates, voters, and progressive candidates can continue to move as if the law had never been signed, the landscape for voting rights remains difficult in Mississippi. But advocates are quick to mention that they will continue to work to make progress. 

“We along with our partners and our co-counsel are absolutely prepared to do everything that we can to protect the rights of citizens with disabilities,” said Walton. “Whatever that road looks like going forward, we’re prepared to fight for accessibility in Mississippi’s voting system.”

Correction (Sept. 14): An earlier version of this post misspelled the name of the communications officer from Disability Rights Mississippi.

This article is part of U.S. Democracy Day, a nationwide collaborative on Sept. 15, the International Day of Democracy, in which news organizations cover how democracy works and the threats it faces. To learn more, visit usdemocracyday.org.

The post Mississippi Organizers Navigate Difficult Voting Rights Terrain in Run Up to November appeared first on Bolts.

Republicans had been barreling ahead with legislation that would make it a felony in most cases to aid another person in requesting, filling out or returning voting ballots. The bill had sailed through one chamber of the Alabama legislature, and was widely expected to pass the other. But when the Alabama senate convened for its final day of the 2023 legislative session last Tuesday, the controversial bill was not among those included for floor debate.

That news was a welcome surprise to the bill’s opponents, a coalition of voting rights, civil rights and disability rights groups that expected it would pass. And it came in the same week as another unexpected victory for the state’s voting rights community, as the U.S. Supreme Court ruled on Thursday that Alabama’s aggressively gerrymandered congressional map violated the Voting Rights Act. 

“We’re absolutely thrilled over here,” said ACLU of Alabama Policy & Advocacy Director Dillon Nettles.

Voting rights advocates were able to breathe a sigh of relief at these two victories for now, but that doesn’t mean that the fight is over: these groups are already bracing for Republicans to revisit the absentee ballot bill in next year’s legislative session.

“It will come back. I think it’s going to be a big issue next year. I think they’ll push it much earlier next year,” Senate Minority Leader Bobby Singleton, a Democrat, told Bolts.

Republicans’ House Bill 209 would have created draconian punishments for people if they help others fill out or return their absentee ballots, in an attempt to dramatically reduce efforts from get out the vote organizations.

The bill would have made it a class D felony punishable by up to five years in prison and $7,500 in fines for people who distribute, order, request, collect, complete, obtain or deliver an absentee ballot or ballot application on behalf of another person. That’s the same felony category as credit card fraud.

Anyone paid to help fill out an absentee ballot could have faced class C felony charges and a prison sentence as long as 10 years. Those who knowingly pay a third party to take any of these actions on an absentee ballot could have faced a class B felony charge—the same class of felony as first-degree manslaughter in Alabama—and one with prison sentences as long as 20 years. 

“That bill would have made felons out of folks that are just trying to help their friends and neighbors,” said Alabama League of Women Voters President Kathy Jones. “If it had passed, we would have sued.”

Opponents of these proposals argue that these penalties would have a chilling effect on absentee voting by making it harder for people who need assistance to receive, fill out and return their ballots. And they say it would have an outsized impact on Black voters—especially those who live in the poor, rural Black Belt region of the state.

“The highest percent of absentee ballots come out of the Black community, out of the Black Belt counties. We don’t have a lot of jobs in those communities, so those who live in those communities have to drive 40, 50, 60 miles a day. So the absentee ballot is the way that they can vote,” said Singleton. “It could look to be voter suppression based on where the large number of absentees come from—out of the Black community.”

The bill would have exempted family members and roommates from the ban, and an amendment exempted people who help blind, disabled and illiterate people fill out their ballots from the criminal penalties.

But disability rights advocates remained alarmed by the legislation even after it was amended, saying it might violate federal law.

“We were very concerned about HB 209 even after the amendment was presented. According to the Americans With Disability Act, every individual should be provided equal opportunity to participate in all services, programs and activities,” Barbara Manuel, president of the Alabama chapter of the National Federation for the Blind, told Bolts.

Alabama is already one of the most difficult states in the nation for voters. It’s one of only three states that doesn’t allow any options for in-person early voting. It’s also one of only 15 states that requires voters to provide a specific excuse to request an absentee ballot. Approved reasons include if the voter won’t be in their home county on Election Day, if they’re ill or disabled, if they’ll be at work for the entire 10-hour stretch that polls are open, or if they’re a caregiver for a homebound family member. And Republicans passed a strict voter ID law more than a decade ago. 

This bill is the latest GOP attempt to criminalize get out the vote efforts, casting a pall over normal political organizing in the name of election security. Alabama Republicans’ stated goal was to end what they describe as “ballot harvesting”—outside groups churning up large-scale operations to collect absentee ballots from voters and deliver them to election offices. Republicans claim these operations create ripe opportunities for voting fraud. While absentee ballot voting fraud does exist, there are only a few known examples (the best-known of which was actually carried out by a Republican operative in North Carolina who was eventually indicted for it).

But voting fraud has become a rallying cry for Republicans across the country as they seek to restrict methods of voting—especially by those Republicans who have embraced conspiracy theories about the 2020 election. A recent analysis by States Newsroom found that more than 100 election-related legal penalties were added to state laws in 2022 alone, across 26 different states. The majority of them were directed at voters and people assisting them.

This bill has been championed by Alabama Republican Secretary of State Wes Allen, who has pushed conspiracy theories related to the 2020 presidential election and who introduced a similar bill in 2022, when he was still in the legislature. 

Allen said the bill “makes incredible strides in protecting the rights of Alabama voters to cast their own votes without undue influence” in an opinion column in the Alabama Ledger.

“HB209 would make it illegal to pay, or to be paid by a third party to collect absentee ballot applications or absentee ballots from Alabama voters. Furthermore, it would eliminate the ability of organizations to sow the seeds of chaos and confusion by sending pre-filled absentee applications into our state,” he continued. “Our elections are the foundation of our constitutional republic, and nobody should be paid for their absentee application or their ballot. Ballot harvesting should not be a job description.”

Allen’s vocal support of this bill is his latest attack on voting access. When he was a state lawmaker, Allen introduced legislation to ban curbside voting and outside donations and grants to help finance local election offices, both of which became law. 

Allen was one of four election deniers to win a secretary of state election during the 2022 midterms. One of his first acts in office was to withdraw Alabama from the Electronic Registration Information Center (ERIC), a national system used by 30 other states to share voter registration data to identify people who had moved or died so they could be removed from voting rolls. That system became the target of right-wing conspiracy theory websites like the Gateway Pundit after the 2020 election, and Allen echoed their false claims, claiming the bipartisan, multi-state organization was a “Soros-funded, leftist group.”

In the session’s final stretch this year, HB 209 e seemed to be on a glide path to becoming law. It was approved by the GOP-dominated house by a 76-28 vote along party lines last month and had been approved in committee in the senate, where Republicans hold a 27-8 majority.

But the bill was surprisingly left off the schedule when the senate convened last Tuesday on the final day’s legislative session.

It’s unclear exactly why the bill stalled out. Sources say that some Republican lawmakers privately expressed concerns about collateral impacts on voters—and some speculated that the Republican tasked with pushing it through the senate had other priorities.

“Some concerns came from the Black caucus, and some came from some Republicans who thought the elderly would get confused,” an Alabama Republican who requested anonymity to discuss private conversations told Bolts.

Sources also speculated that Garlan Gudger, the bill’s lead sponsor in the senate, may have prioritized another controversial bill of his that targeted vaping products, to the detriment of the absentee voting bill. Neither bill passed the senate.

“He had the vaping bill, which had really been a priority for him,” said ACLU of Alabama Policy & Advocacy Director Dillon Nettles. “I think that that certainly did play out in our favor.”

Allen, Gudger and Representative Jamie Kiel, the Republican lawmaker who introduced the bill in the state House, didn’t respond to calls and emails requesting comment for this story. 

The bill died in the Senate just days before the U.S. Supreme Court struck down Alabama Republicans’ aggressive congressional gerrymander, upholding a key section of the Voting Rights Act ruling to rule that the state had illegally diluted Black residents’ voting power. The conservative Supreme Court has been hostile to the Voting Rights Act in past rulings, so this 5-4 decision, with Chief Justice John Roberts and Justice Brett Kavanaugh joining the court’s liberal wing, came as a shock. Alabama will likely now have to create a second Black-majority congressional district.

The ruling does nothing to stop Alabama Republicans from pushing aggressive bills to curtail voting access, however. A decade ago, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in Shelby County v. Holder that Alabama and other states with a history of racist voter suppression no longer had to submit any changes to their voting rules for preclearance by the federal government. That’s led Republicans to flood those states—and others—with a bevy of restrictive changes to election law. Voting rights advocates and Democrats think there’s a strong possibility that HB 209 will be reintroduced next legislative session—with more time for Republicans to push it through.

“It’s coming. This secretary of state is not going to give up,” said Singleton. “We know we’re going to have to have a real fight next year on this bill. It’s going to come back.”

“I don’t think we’re out of the woods,” said Nettles.

The post Voting Rights Just Got a Second Surprise Win in Alabama appeared first on Bolts.