On One America News Newtwork Christina Bobb made a series of dubious or demonstrably false claims about the 2020 Maricopa County election in a February 2021 special in an attempt to bolster the lie spread by former Donald Trump and others that he didn’t really lose Arizona by about 10,000 votes. (Screenshot via Bitchute)

Policy, politics and progressive commentary

Less than a week after the Republican National Committee unveiled a “historic” new program to monitor the polls for fraud in Nevada and other battleground states, a top lawyer with the committee was among those indicted for an alleged scheme to use false fraud claims to overturn the results of Arizona’s presidential election.

Indeed, the lawyer, RNC senior counsel for election integrity Christina Bobb, was scheduled to appear April 25 at an online meeting to recruit activists for the GOP’s vote-watching effort, though she didn’t show up. The meeting was organized by fringe conspiracy theorists who, like Bobb, have helped spread lies about illegal voting.

Arizona Attorney General Kris Mayes announced the indictments on April 24 against 18 people, seven of whose names are redacted. Multiple news organizations have used details in the indictment to identify Bobb and the other six. Mayes on Friday confirmed Bobb’s indictment.

The confluence of events involving Bobb, the RNC and a loose network of anti-fraud activists underscores how the Trump-controlled GOP appears to be laying the groundwork to contest this year’s election using the same false claims about illegal voting — and even some of the same key figures — as it did in 2020.

Asked for comment on Bobb’s reported indictment and whether she remained employed by the RNC, an RNC spokesperson declined to answer on the record.

Bobb did not respond to an inquiry about her failure to appear at the April 25 event.

GOP’s ‘historic’ vote-monitoring program

The Arizona indictments came less than a week after the Trump campaign and the RNC announced a “historic, 100,000 person strong” effort to closely monitor the voting process, calling it, “the most extensive and monumental election integrity program in the nation’s history.”

“Whenever a ballot is being cast or counted, Republican poll watchers will be observing the process and reporting any irregularity,” the RNC declared in a press release.

The committee called the initiative “an historic collaboration between the RNC, the Trump Campaign, and passionate grassroots coalitions who are deeply invested in fighting voter fraud.” That appeared to be a reference to the party’s outreach to anti-fraud activists like those at Thursday’s meeting — many of whom have bought in to lies about the 2020 election.

Multiple lawsuits found no evidence of systematic or widespread fraud in 2020.

The RNC’s vote-monitoring effort has been championed by Lara Trump, former President Donald Trump’s daughter-in-law, who took over as RNC co-chair in late February. Bobb was announced as an election integrity lawyer at the RNC soon afterward.

Trump is the presumptive Republican nominee for president in 2024.

Lara Trump warned in an April 23 interview that the vote-monitoring program will include “people who can physically handle ballots” at polling places on Election Day. The rules for partisan poll watchers differ from state to state.

17 charged in fake electors plot

Bobb’s failure to attend Thursday’s online meeting, after organizers had promoted her appearance in advance, may have been because she has more urgent matters on her mind.

The indictments filed in Arizona allege a plot to use fake electors to overturn the state’s 2020 presidential vote.

The 11 people named in the indictment are the Arizona fake electors themselves, all Trump allies. The other seven people, whose names are redacted, have been identified by news outlets, including CNN and the New York Times, as Bobb, as well as Trump allies Rudy Giuliani, Mark Meadows, John Eastman, Jenna Ellis, Mike Roman and Boris Epshteyn.

One of the seven, the indictment says, “was an attorney for the Trump Campaign” and “made false claims of widespread election fraud in Arizona and in six other states.” That person also “encouraged the Arizona Legislature to change the outcome of the election,” and “encouraged (Vice President Mike) Pence to accept the false Arizona Republican electors’ votes on January 6, 2021,” according to the indictment.

Bobb joined the Trump campaign as a lawyer in the aftermath of the 2020 vote, and was among the campaign officials, led by Giuliani, who organized a scheme to use false fraud claims as justification for submitting fake electors in seven states Trump lost, including Arizona, CNN has reported.

Bobb also tweeted on January 6, 2021: “@VP @Mike_Pence can solve this now by sending it back to the legislators.”

The indictment lists Trump — unnamed but described as “a former president of the United States who spread false claims of election fraud following the 2020 election” — as an unindicted co-conspirator.

The indictment alleges that as part of the scheme, the fake electors voted for Trump to receive Arizona’s electoral votes, “falsely claiming to be the duly elected and qualified Electors for President and Vice President of the United States from the State of Arizona.”

“Defendants deceived the citizens of Arizona by falsely claiming that those votes were contingent only on a legal challenge that would change the outcome of the election,” the indictment continues. “In reality, Defendants intended that their false votes for Trump-Pence would encourage Pence to reject the Biden-Harris votes on January 6, 2021, regardless of the outcome of the legal challenge.”

RNC courts conspiracy theorists, election deniers

The meeting at which Bobb was scheduled to appear Thursday was organized by two Florida activists with ties to leading election deniers, including MyPillow CEO Mike Lindell, and included hundreds of grassroots anti-fraud activists from across the country.

It follows a similar April 4 event, at which the director of the RNC’s election integrity program, Christina Norton, told activists how to get involved with the party’s vote-monitoring program. States Newsroom attended both virtual meetings.

The April 25 meeting featured a parade of speakers, including the former Democratic consultant Naomi Wolf, making claims about illegal voting in 2020 and 2022, predicting that this year’s vote will be similarly rigged, and rallying supporters to take action.

“The current situation is that President Trump will once again win the presidential election just as he did in 2020,” said one speaker, Greg Stenstrom, a Pennsylvania-based conspiracy theorist who co-authored the book “The Parallel Election: A Blueprint for Deception,” which alleged massive fraud in that state’s 2020 vote.

“But it will be taken from him, and all of us, again, unless we restore fair and honest elections in the short time we have remaining before November. He cannot hold onto the presidency unless we act.”

In place of a live appearance by Bobb, Steve Stern, an organizer of the call, played an interview he’d conducted recently with her for his podcast.

In the interview, Stern asked Bobb what could be done about President Joe Biden’s plan to add “a million illegal aliens” to the voter rolls. (There is no evidence that Biden has such a plan, despite frequent similar claims by the far right.)

Bobb agreed there is a “concerted effort to empower the illegals to cast ballots,” adding: “It’s a very, very, serious issue this time around, and it’s something that we’re looking into … Is it something that law enforcement needs to handle, because there could potentially be a criminal component to it?”

“As far as illegals voting,” Bobb continued, “once they have registered, it’s very hard to undo that process. Because the registration is presumed valid.”

Studies have consistently shown that the amount of voting by non-citizens is minuscule. A 2017 Brennan Center analysis found that suspected — not proven — votes by non-citizens accounted for just 0.0001 percent of all votes cast in the 2016 election.

Other connections

In addition to these two meetings, there have been other recent instances of RNC staff courting right-wing activists who have spread election disinformation.

Bobb spoke last month with the far-right podcaster Breanna Morello. And she joined a recent conference call with several Trump-allied groups that have promoted lies about 2020, the Guardian reported.

Both the April 25 and April 4 meetings were organized by Stern and Raj Doraisamy, two far-right Florida activists and Lindell allies who have helped spread false claims about illegal voting.

Last month, Stern spoke with Steve Bannon, the former Trump adviser, to promote the April 4 meeting. “We have so many illegal aliens in this country,” Stern said. “They want to vote. We gotta stop them.”

Doraisamy was reportedly outside the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, and went on to found a group, Defend Florida, that went door to door to gather thousands of “affidavits” from Floridians in an effort to show that the state’s 2020 election was corrupted by massive fraud.

At a 2022 event organized by the group, Doraisamy thanked Lindell for his help with the door-to-door effort.

Also speaking at the April 25 meeting call was Joe Hoft, whose Gateway Pundit website, co-founded with Hoft’s brother Jim, has been a key vector for the spread of false conspiracy theories about the 2020 election, the covid vaccine, and more.

Joe Hoft’s self-published book, “The Steal,”  is described this way on its Google Books page: “It’s early in the morning of November 4th, President Trump was way ahead in the swing states, but he warned of 4am ballot drops. He was right again. When Americans woke up later that morning, the election had been stolen.”

Another speaker at the meeting, Jay Valentine, used initial funding from Lindell to create voter data monitoring software.

According to documents obtained by the progressive group American Oversight, Valentine has worked closely with Trump lawyer Sidney Powell, a key figure in the effort to overturn the 2020 election, to convince lawmakers in Wisconsin and other states to use his “fractal programming technology” to uncover mass fraud.

“Voter fraud is a nationwide crime perpetrated locally, mostly by Democrats,” Valentine has written separately, promoting the idea of a national election fraud database. “We cannot fight industrial, sovereign, large-scale, election fraud with reports, press releases, and webinars.”

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Concern over illegal immigration and border security was Donald Trump’s central campaign issue when he won the presidency in 2016, and polls show it as the GOP’s most potent political weapon again in 2024. (Photo by John Moore/Getty Images)

Policy, politics and progressive commentary

With polls showing unauthorized immigration as Republicans’ best issue for the fall, the GOP is looking to raise the alarm about voting by non-citizens and the undocumented.

The multi-pronged effort has been advanced in congressional legislation, public statements by top election officials and U.S. senators, plans produced by grassroots activists, and posts on X by former President Donald Trump and others.

Concern over illegal immigration and border security was Trump’s central campaign issue when he won the presidency in 2016, and polls show it as the GOP’s most potent political weapon again in 2024. A Feb. 27 Gallup poll found 28% of respondents saw it as the country’s most important issue, well ahead of any other topic.

At an April 2 rally in Michigan, Trump seized on the recent murder of a local woman, Ruby Garcia, who law enforcement has alleged was killed by her undocumented boyfriend.

“We threw him out of the country and crooked Joe Biden let him back in and let him stay and he viciously killed Ruby,” said Trump.

But the party is also using the issue to bolster its ongoing push to stoke fear about voter fraud and press for more restrictive voting rules. And it has often trafficked in false and misleading claims about voting by undocumented immigrants.

Voter fraud claims

Voting by non-citizens is extremely rare. That’s because, voting advocates say, non-citizens are especially careful not to do anything that might jeopardize their status in the country.

A voter fraud database run by the conservative Heritage Foundation, which covers several decades in which billions of votes have been cast across the country, contains 29 entries that mention non-citizens. In some of these, a non-citizen registered but did not vote.

Still, over the last few weeks, Republican secretaries of state from Georgia, Mississippi, and Alabama, and at least two U.S. Senate Republicans, were the latest to tout the issue.

Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger wrote in a March 12 op-ed that “leftist-activist allies” of President Joe Biden “want to open the gate to non-citizen voting.”

At issue is a lawsuit challenging a Georgia measure requiring people registering to vote to show documentary proof of citizenship.

The voting-rights advocates behind the suit say the requirement isn’t needed, and can present a barrier to registration for some voters, especially naturalized citizens, who may not have easy access to citizenship documents.

In the op-ed, Raffensperger, who famously resisted Trump’s pressure to collude in subverting Georgia’s 2020 election results, sought to conflate the issue of illegal voting by the undocumented with burgeoning efforts by a few Democratic-led cities, including Washington, D.C., to allow legal non-citizens to vote in local elections.

He has pushed for a constitutional amendment in Georgia that would bar local governments in the state from enfranchising non-citizens.

“Leftist activists have already shown that they want to change the laws that require voters to be U.S. citizens,” Raffensperger wrote. “A constitutional amendment would eliminate any possibility for future efforts to change those laws.”

Warning on DOJ program

Days earlier, Mississippi Secretary of State Michael Watson sent a letter to the U.S. Justice Department, warning that a federal program aimed at making voter registration easier for people in the custody of the U.S. Marshals Service and the Bureau of Prison could lead to the registration not only of ineligible felons but also of the undocumented.

“Due to the Biden Administration’s border policies, millions of illegal aliens have not only been allowed into this country during the last three years, but they have also been allowed to stay. Many of these aliens have been in the custody of an agency of the Department of Justice including the Marshals,” Watson wrote in the letter, which his office provided to States Newsroom.

“Providing ineligible non-citizens with information on how to register to vote undoubtedly encourages them to illegally register to vote.”

The Justice Department program is part of the Biden administration’s response to the president’s sweeping 2021 executive order aimed at using federal government agencies to expand access to voter registration. Republicans have condemned the order as an improper attempt to use public resources to advance partisan political goals. There is no evidence the order has led to ineligible voters being added to the rolls.

Alabama Secretary of State Wes Allen, as well as Sen. Katie Britt, R-Ala., also sought to raise concerns about non-citizen voting in an exchange at a March 12 hearing of the U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee. The two Alabama Republicans charged that the federal government has denied election officials the tools they need to verify citizenship.

“I think (verifying citizenship) is important, now more than ever, especially given what’s happening at the southern border,” said Allen, who was testifying before the panel.

At the same hearing, Sen. Mike Lee, R-Utah, used his time to ask the witnesses if they agreed that only U.S. citizens should be able to vote in federal elections — something that’s already the law — and that people registering to vote should have to show proof of citizenship. Lee later sent out a clip of the exchange on X. 

Memo calls for proof of citizenship to register

Also last month, the conservative voting activist Cleta Mitchell, who played a key role in Trump’s bid to overturn the 2020 election, circulated a memo on “the threat of non-citizen voting in 2024.” The memo, posted online by a conservative advocacy group, called for a federal law requiring people to show proof of citizenship when registering, among other steps.

“There are myriad left-wing advocacy groups who register illegals to vote,” Mitchell wrote, a charge for which she did not provide evidence.

But the party’s efforts to tie together voting and immigration have been underway for longer in this election cycle. Last March, as States Newsroom reported, a group of prominent conservative election activists came together to promote what they called a national campaign to “protect voting at all levels of government as the exclusive right of citizens.”

Months later, congressional Republicans unveiled a sweeping elections bill, which aimed to capture the GOP’s top priorities in its push to tighten voting rules, and which contained a full section on stopping non-citizen voting.

Among other steps, the measure would give states more access to federal data on citizenship and make it easier for them to remove people flagged as non-citizens from the rolls. It also would penalize states where non-citizens can vote in local elections by cutting their share of federal election funding.

While Democrats control the Senate and White House, the bill has little chance of becoming law.

Legislation on non-citizen voting

Separately, in the current session of Congress alone, the House Administration Committee has passed seven different bills addressing non-citizen voting.

Last year, the House voted to use Congress’ authority over the District of Columbia to overturn D.C.’s law enfranchising non-citizens — the first time the House had voted to overturn a District bill since 2015. The Senate didn’t take up the bill.

One Republican lawmaker introduced a resolution calling for a constitutional amendment to ban non-citizen voting.

Legal non-citizen voting has a long history in the U.S. In the middle of the 19th century, at least 16 states passed measures enfranchising non-citizens, often to lure workers to underpopulated western states.

These laws were gradually repealed in the late 19th and early 20th century — a period when a more general anxiety about mass voting led to Jim Crow laws in the South and laws restricting voting by Catholic and Jewish immigrants in the north.

Some prominent figures have falsely suggested that Democrats are soft-pedaling border security so they can benefit from the votes of the undocumented.

“That’s why they are allowing these people to come in — people that don’t speak our language — they are signing them up to vote,” Trump said at a January rally in Iowa. “And I believe that’s why you are having millions of people pour into our country and it could very well affect the next election. That’s why they are doing it.”

Elon Musk, the billionaire tech entrepreneur, has taken a similar view.

“Dems won’t deport, because every illegal is a highly likely vote at some point,” Musk told his over 170 million followers in a Feb. 26 post on X, which he owns, commenting on news that an undocumented immigrant hadn’t been deported despite a string of arrests. “That simple incentive explains what seems to be insane behavior.”

U.S. Sen. J.D. Vance, R-Ohio, charged in a 2022 TV ad: “Joe Biden’s open border is killing Ohioans with more illegal drugs and more Democrat voters pouring into this country.”

Kansas law

One figure who may have done more than any to promote the threat of voting by non-citizens is Kansas Attorney General Kris Kobach. As the state’s secretary of state, Kobach pushed for a law requiring voter registrants to provide proof of citizenship.

The law was ultimately struck down by a federal court, which found “no credible evidence” that a significant number of non-citizens had registered to vote before it was implemented. The law was responsible for keeping tens of thousands of voter registration applications in limbo during an election.

Kobach went on to chair a voter fraud commission created in 2017 by the Trump White House, which pushed for a federal law similar to the Kansas law. The panel disbanded the following year without providing evidence of widespread voter fraud.

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In Nevada, the Republican National Committee has formally weighed in against proposed changes to Nevada’s election rules, including one that makes it easier for election officials to prevent volunteer observers from disrupting the counting of mail ballots. (Photo: April Corbin Girnus/Nevada Current)

Policy, politics and progressive commentary

Fearing that Democrats hold a crucial edge in ballots cast before Election Day, national Republicans are working to convince their voters to take advantage of mail and early voting this year.

“We can’t play catch up. We can’t start from behind. We can’t let Dems get a big head start and think we’re going to win it all on Election Day,” Republican National Committee chair Ronna McDaniel said in November on a conference call aimed at promoting the group’s Bank Your Vote initiative to encourage early and mail voting. “Things happen on Election Day.”

But the party’s army of lawyers is, more quietly, sending a very different message. The RNC is fighting in courtrooms and legal filings in key election battlegrounds across the country to make it harder to cast a mail ballot and to have it counted.

On Feb. 20, attorneys for the RNC were in a federal courtroom in Philadelphia, in a bid to require that Pennsylvania throw out mail ballots with missing or incorrect dates.

Eleven days earlier, they filed a lawsuit challenging several provisions of Arizona’s newly adopted election rules, including a rule allowing voters who have not shown proof of citizenship to cast a mail ballot.

And that same day, they asked a court in Georgia to uphold a state law that imposes stricter rules on mail voting.

Separately, in recent months the RNC has asked courts to let it join the defense of laws in Ohio, Wisconsin, and North Carolina that similarly impose tighter rules on mail voting (judges in the latter two states denied the requests, while the Ohio motion was approved).

The party also has sued to block a New York law that lets people vote by mail without an excuse (the state’s Supreme Court this month dismissed the complaint). And it has formally weighed in against proposed changes to Nevada’s election rules, including one that makes it easier for election officials to prevent volunteer observers from disrupting the counting of mail ballots.

In January, the RNC went further than ever, filing a lawsuit in Mississippi that it has said aims to obtain a nationwide ban on mail ballots that arrive after Election Day. RNC lawyers stated plainly in their complaint that Republicans’ interests are at stake because mail voting tends to favor Democrats.

States with close races targeted

Though it’s received relatively little attention, the RNC’s legal onslaught could have a major impact on the 2024 elections.

Pennsylvania, Georgia, Arizona, Wisconsin, North Carolina, and Nevada are all set to be among the closest states in this year’s presidential race, while Pennsylvania, Ohio, Arizona, Wisconsin, and Nevada host pivotal U.S. Senate contests. New York, meanwhile, is home to several swing congressional districts that could determine control of the U.S. House.

And the legal effort against mail voting has been matched by a legislative one. Thirteen states, including Florida, Texas, North Carolina, Arizona, and Ohio, have passed 16 bills to restrict mail voting since the start of 2023, according to a database run by the Voting Rights Lab.

It all amounts to a multi-pronged effort to suppress voting by mail, voting advocates say — one that could threaten access to the ballot this fall, especially for Democrats, who are now more likely than Republicans to use mail voting. At its core are legal arguments aimed at convincing judges to interpret the law in ways that are explicitly adverse to voters.

The push sits uneasily alongside an RNC campaign to convince GOP voters to embrace mail and early voting. But it’s right in keeping with former President Donald Trump’s years-long, evidence-free campaign against voting by mail.

“In courtrooms and state legislatures across the country, Republicans are doing everything in their power to restrict mail-in voting,” said Marc Elias, a prominent Democratic election lawyer, in a statement. “The RNC’s legal strategy is clear. The Republican Party no longer seeks to earn the support of a majority of the American electorate. Instead, they are launching a legal assault on our democracy.”

A spokesman for the RNC did not respond to a request for comment.

A muddled message on mail voting

In 2020, many states loosened rules on mail voting in response to COVID-19. That year’s election saw record high turnout despite the pandemic, with nearly half of all voters casting a mail ballot — a huge increase from around 22% in 2016.

Even with COVID-19 tamed, many states have kept their more liberal mail voting rules in place, or, like New York, have passed new laws expanding access to mail ballots.

While leading Democrats have embraced mail voting, Trump has repeatedly denounced it, falsely claiming it opens the door to massive fraud.

“MILLIONS OF MAIL-IN BALLOTS WILL BE PRINTED BY FOREIGN COUNTRIES,” Trump tweeted in June 2020, adding that the result would be a “RIGGED” election.

It’s true that several of the extremely rare instances of proven voter fraud have involved mail voting. But there’s no evidence of systematic mail voter fraud of the kind that Trump has claimed threatens the integrity of a presidential election.

A voter fraud database run by the Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank, lists 279 cases of “fraudulent use of absentee ballots,” going back to 1988 — since which time hundreds of millions of mail ballots have been cast.

Meanwhile, GOP lawyers have gone to the mat to try to put the mail voting genie back in the bottle.

“We’ve watched Democrats systematically try to codify those post-COVID changes that they made, and we’ve been in the courts trying to keep those pre-COVID protections in place for our elections,” RNC chair Ronna McDaniel explained in October. “There’s been a battle waged.”

It’s not surprising, then, that Democrats have in recent elections used mail voting at significantly higher rates than Republicans. So pronounced is the split that in 2020, President Joe Biden won the mail vote in 14 out of 15 states analyzed by 538.com, while Trump likewise won the Election Day vote in 14 out of 15.

That’s led the GOP to fret that it now often goes into Election Day already trailing by a significant margin. In response, the RNC last year launched the Bank Your Vote initiative to encourage Republicans to vote early or by mail.

The effort includes websites in all 50 states, and even an ad recorded by Trump — albeit without much visible enthusiasm.

“Sign up and commit to voting early,” Trump says. “We must defeat the far left at their own game.”

But Trump has continued to muddy that message.

“You know, we have these elections that last for 62 days,” Trump declared last month in his victory speech after the Iowa caucuses. “And if you need some more time, take as much time as you want. And so many bad things happen. We have to get rid of mail-in ballots because once you have mail-in ballots, you have crooked elections.”

RNC court filings

The RNC’s legal assault on mail voting suggests a similar view. In several court filings, RNC lawyers have suggested that tight safeguards are needed to ensure mail voting doesn’t allow for fraudulent votes.

Ohio’s law that restricts who can return a mail ballot on behalf of a voter should be upheld, the RNC argued in one typical filing, because it guards against “an increased risk of voter fraud and other irregularities.”

The Republican bid to restrict mail voting is part of a larger effort by the party since 2020 to devote more resources to “election integrity” — tighter election rules that prioritize anti-fraud measures over access. It includes a year-round election integrity legal department, which has said it worked with over 90 law firms and participated in nearly 100 lawsuits during the 2022 cycle.

So far this cycle, the RNC has paid over $4 million to two top Republican law firms, Consovoy McCarthy and Wiley Rein, according to FEC records. Thomas McCarthy, a co-founder of Consovoy McCarthy, is listed on RNC motions in the Mississippi, Georgia and Wisconsin cases, among others.

The focus on “election integrity” comes as McDaniel, the RNC chair, is reported to be stepping down at the end of the month. Trump’s choice to replace her, North Carolina GOP chair Michael Whatley, has stressed the importance of tight voting rules for Republican success, States Newsroom has reported.

Chipping away at mail votes

The most far-reaching of the RNC’s cases is the lawsuit it filed with other Republicans in January against a Mississippi law that allows mail ballots that arrive up to five days after an election to be counted, as long as they’re postmarked by Election Day.

Federal law sets Election Day as the Tuesday after the first Monday in November, the suit argues, so by extending the election past that day, Mississippi is violating federal law.

The RNC has said the goal is to obtain a ruling from a judge that bars post-Election-Day ballots from being counted not just in Mississippi but nationwide. The 5th Circuit, which contains Mississippi, is known as perhaps the most conservative judicial circuit in the country.

Election law experts have said it’s unlikely, but not impossible, that a court could accept the RNC’s argument.

If the case were to reach the Supreme Court, at least one justice appears friendly. In 2020, when the court upheld Wisconsin’s ban on late-arriving ballots, Justice Brett Kavanaugh wrote that states have the right to set election deadlines “to avoid the chaos and suspicions of impropriety that can ensue when thousands of absentee ballots flow in after election day and potentially flip the results of an election.”

Mississippi is one of 18 states — including key battlegrounds like Ohio, Nevada, Virginia, Texas, and New York — plus the District of Columbia, that count ballots that arrive after Election Day. (North Carolina last year passed a law that restricts mail voting in several ways, including by banning ballots that arrive after Election Day. It’s that law that the RNC sought unsuccessfully to help defend from a court challenge by Democrats, which is ongoing.)

The number of votes at issue could be significant. In 2020, the U.S. Postal Service said it processed nearly 190,000 ballots in the two days after the election. Most of those, it said, were in states that allow late-arriving ballots.

The Mississippi lawsuit makes clear that, despite the Bank Your Vote campaign, Republicans want to curtail mail voting because they think it gives Democrats an edge.

“Because voting by mail is starkly polarized by party, [allowing late-arriving ballots] directly harms Plaintiffs,” the RNC’s lawyers wrote in the complaint. “For example, according to the MIT Election Lab, 46% of Democratic voters in the 2022 General Election mailed in their ballots, compared to only 27% of Republicans. That means the late-arriving mail-in ballots that are counted for five additional days disproportionately break for Democrats.”

Chipping away at mail votes

The Pennsylvania case is another that could reverberate. In November 2022, the state Supreme Court ruled — in response to a suit filed by the RNC and other Republicans — that over 10,000 mail ballots on which the voter had neglected to write the date on the outer envelope, or had written an incorrect date, must be rejected.

The state’s NAACP chapter filed its own suit in federal court in response. The RNC quickly intervened, arguing that the state Supreme Court’s ruling should be upheld. A district court ruled for the NAACP in November, finding that the Civil Rights Act bars states from rejecting votes based on immaterial paperwork errors. The RNC appealed, arguing for a narrower interpretation of the landmark civil rights law, setting up the Feb. 20 hearing.

In a sign that the case could have an impact beyond Pennsylvania, 17 Republican-led states last month submitted an amicus brief in support of the RNC’s position.

The other cases may not have the same reach as those two. But together, they broadly aim to tighten the rules around mail voting to a degree that could significantly chip away at mail votes.

RNC lawyers have marshaled a range of arguments in these cases.

They have claimed, unsuccessfully, that New York’s law expanding access to mail voting violates the state’s constitution, which bans no-excuse mail voting. They’ve said Georgia’s new deadline to apply for a mail ballot of seven days before Election Day doesn’t violate the federal law barring deadlines of fewer than 11 days, because the federal government lacks the authority to regulate these deadlines.

No mail voting rule appears too small to escape the notice of RNC lawyers. This month’s lawsuit against Arizona targets a new rule that lets voters who registered without proof of citizenship — and therefore, under Arizona law, can vote in federal elections only — receive a mail ballot, arguing that state law bars these voters from voting by mail.

And they’ve submitted comments to a Nevada commission, criticizing a proposed rule there that gives election officials more power to ensure the counting process for mail ballots isn’t disrupted. The new powers could let election officials infringe on the public’s right to witness the counting, the group’s lawyers assert.

Meanwhile, supporters of mail voting say Republican fears about an influx of Democratic mail votes may be misplaced.

“Americans have used mail ballots for over a hundred years because they provide a safe and convenient way to ensure the right to vote,” said Barbara Smith Warner, the executive director of the National Vote at Home Institute, which advocates for mail voting. “Research has demonstrated time and time again that voting at home increases voter participation and turnout for all, with no partisan advantage for any side.”

“Attacks on mail ballots are red herrings to distract from their true intent — making it harder for citizens to vote, and sowing distrust in our elections,” Smith Warner said.

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Donald Trump is backing Michael Whatley, the chair of the North Carolina GOP, to be the next Republican National Committee chair. (Photo by Scott Olson/Getty Images)

Policy, politics and progressive commentary

Former President Donald Trump’s choice to be the next chair of the national Republican Party briefly teamed up last election cycle with a group closely tied to Cleta Mitchell, the conservative lawyer who played a key role in Trump’s bid to subvert the 2020 vote.

Trump is backing Michael Whatley, the chair of the North Carolina GOP, to be the next Republican National Committee chair, the New York Times reported Feb. 6. Ronna McDaniel, who currently holds the post, has told Trump she will step down later this month, according to the Times.

Whatley, a veteran GOP campaign operative who served in the administration of President George W. Bush, is reported to have won Trump’s support because he backs Trump’s baseless claim that the 2020 election was stolen through widespread voter fraud. Last year, Trump endorsed Whatley, who is currently the RNC’s general counsel, to be the organization’s co-chair.

Whatley spoke at a 2022 conference organized by the North Carolina Election Integrity Team, the group’s founder, Jim Womack, told States Newsroom.

“We brought them to our summit,” said Womack. “I gave Whatley an opportunity to address our people, and he talked about how it was going to be a great team effort.”

Around that time, Whatley also let Womack briefly plug NCEIT on a conference call of county chairs, said Womack, who chairs the Lee County GOP.

NCEIT is a chapter of the Election Integrity Network, which Mitchell founded in 2021 to train poll watchers to aggressively hunt for fraud at the polls. Womack has called Mitchell “our mentor.”

Mitchell, who is based in North Carolina, was closely involved in Trump’s efforts to overturn the result of the 2020 election, including participating in the December 2020 phone call on which Trump urged Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger to “find” the votes he needed to win the state.

A special grand jury in Fulton County, Georgia recommended indicting Mitchell, but she was not charged.

The North Carolina Republican Party declined to comment about Whatley’s work with NCEIT.

Womack, who ran unsuccessfully against Whatley for state party chair in 2019, said that after Whatley’s appearance at the summit, the relationship fizzled, as Whatley kept NCEIT at arm’s length from the state party.

Womack said the party under Whatley discouraged Republican volunteers from getting involved with NCEIT.

“They were telling a lot of the counties, don’t use their reporting system, don’t go to their training, go to our training,” said Womack.

Indeed, Womack complained that Whatley hadn’t gone far enough in fighting against fraud.

Still, under Whatley, the state party in 2021 unveiled a 16-member “Election Integrity Committee” to push for tighter voting rules and recruit poll watchers.

At a conference that year hosted by the conservative group CPAC, Whatley suggested that if it wasn’t for the party’s election integrity legal work, Democrats would have stolen a 2020 election for state Supreme Court that was won by the Republican candidate by 401 votes.

“You can’t tell me in 100 North Carolina counties, they couldn’t have come up with four votes (in each) if I didn’t have lawyers and attorneys in every single one of those counties,” Whatley said.

“This is gonna have to be part of the Republican establishment going forward,” Whatley added, referring to intensified legal efforts. “This is going to be lawsuit after lawsuit after lawsuit.”

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Ranked choice voting, which asks voters to rank multiple candidates in order of preference, has seen its profile steadily expand since 2016. (Photo by Jeniffer Solis/Nevada Current))

Policy, politics and progressive commentary

With U.S. democracy plagued by extremism, polarization, and a growing disconnect between voters and lawmakers, a set of reforms that could dramatically upend how Americans vote is gaining momentum at surprising speed in Western states.

Ranked choice voting, which asks voters to rank multiple candidates in order of preference, has seen its profile steadily expand since 2016, when Maine became the first state to adopt it. But increasingly, RCV is being paired with a new system for primaries known as Final Five — or in some cases, Final Four — that advances multiple candidates, regardless of party, to the general election.

Together, proponents argue, these twin reforms deliver fairer outcomes that better reflect the will of voters, while disempowering the extremes and encouraging candidates and elected officials to prioritize conciliation and compromise.

Ultimately, they say, the new system can help create a government focused not on partisan point-scoring but on delivering tangible results that improve voters’ lives.

Alaska, the only state currently using RCV-plus-Final Four or Final-Five, appears to be seeing some benefits to its political culture already: After years of partisan rancor, both legislative chambers are now controlled by bipartisan majorities eager to find common ground and respond to the needs of voters, say lawmakers in the state who have embraced the new system.

A slew of other states could soon follow in Alaska’s footsteps. In 2022, Nevada voters approved a constitutional amendment that would create an RCV-plus-Final-Five system — for the measure to take effect, voters must approve it again this year.

Efforts also are underway to get RCV-plus-Final-Five on Arizona’s 2024 ballot, and RCV-plus-Final-Four in Colorado and Idaho — where organizers have announced that they’ve gathered 50,000 signatures (they need around 63,000 to qualify). Even Wisconsin Republicans, who in the redistricting sphere have fought reform efforts tooth and nail, in December held a hearing for bipartisan legislation that would create RCV-plus-Final-Five, though its prospects appear dim.

Meanwhile, Oregon voters will decide this year whether to adopt RCV alone. And last year, Minnesota and Illinois lawmakers passed bills to study RCV, while Connecticut approved a measure that allows local governments to use it.

There are even flickers of interest at the national level. In December alone, two leading Washington, D.C. think tanks that often find themselves on opposite sides — the conservative American Enterprise Institute and the liberal Center for American Progress — each held separate panel discussions that considered RCV-plus-Final-Four/Five.

Katherine Gehl, the founder of the Institute for Political Innovation, and the designer of the Final Four/Five system, calls RCV-plus-Final-Five “transformational.” (Her organization now says advancing five candidates to the general works best, by giving voters more choices.)

“There’s a huge pressure on reformers to say, this is not a silver bullet,” said Gehl. “And OK, I get that.”

But, she added, “I think it’s as close to a silver bullet as you can come.”

Meanwhile, a backlash to reform is brewing, with several Republican-led states banning RCV in recent years. A coalition of national conservative election groups in November warned Wisconsin’s legislative leaders that RCV and Final Five are “intended to dramatically push our politics to the Left.”

Understanding the process

Here’s how RCV-plus-Final-Four/Five works.

In the primary election, candidates from all parties compete against each other, with voters picking only their top choice, as in a conventional election. The top four or five finishers, regardless of party, advance to the general.

In the general, voters use RCV to pick the winner. They fill out their ballot by ranking as many of the candidates as they want, by order of preference.

If no candidate wins a majority of first-place votes, the candidate who finished last is eliminated, and his or her supporters’ second-place votes are allocated. If there’s still no candidate with a majority, the process is repeated with the next-to-last candidate. This continues until someone gains a majority and is declared the winner.

Supporters of the system say the Final Four/Five primary gives a voice to a broader share of voters, while the use of RCV in the general helps ensure a fairer result. Under the current system, two similar candidates together may win a clear majority but split voters between them, allowing a third candidate to win with a minority of votes.

But even more important, many advocates argue, is how the two reforms together can change how candidates and elected officials of all stripes approach their jobs, by adjusting the incentive structure they operate under.

Increasingly, many states and districts are solidly red or blue, meaning the general election is uncompetitive, and the key race takes place in the primary. That’s a problem, because the primary electorate is by and large smaller, more partisan and more extreme than the general electorate.

Right now, with politicians worrying more about the primary than the general, they’re more focused on playing to their base than on reaching beyond it and solving problems, critics argue. It isn’t hard to find evidence for this lately, both in Washington and in state capitals across the country.

By allowing multiple candidates to advance, Final Four/Five shifts the crucial election from the primary to the general. And RCV means the votes of Democrats in red districts and Republicans in blue ones still matter, even if their top choice remains unlikely to win.

Together, it means candidates are rewarded for paying attention to the entire general electorate, not just a small slice of staunch supporters. As a result, it encourages candidates — and elected officials, once in office — toward moderation and problem-solving, and away from extremism.

“People do what it takes to get and keep their jobs,” said Gehl, the Final Four/Five designer. “So if you change who hires and fires, which is to say, November voters instead of primary voters, and you change the system so that there’s real competition in November every time, even once you’re an incumbent, that forces accountability.”

A success story from the Last Frontier?

The experience of Alaska, whose voters passed an RCV-plus-Final-Four system in 2020, offers an illustration.

At its first use in 2022, U.S. Sen. Lisa Murkowski, an independent-minded Republican distrusted by the party’s conservative wing, was reelected. Mary Peltola, a moderate Democrat who kept in place her Republican predecessor’s chief of staff, was elected to the U.S. House, defeating Sarah Palin, the conservative Republican former governor. (Murkowski and Peltola endorsed each other).

Meanwhile, voters reelected Gov. Mike Dunleavy, a conservative Republican – suggesting, reformers say, that the system can produce a wide range of outcomes.

And more women ran in 2022 than in the five previous cycles combined — highlighting how allowing anyone to run, regardless of party, can boost opportunities for under-represented groups.

But the effect on how candidates and lawmakers have approached their jobs has been more dramatic still, advocates say.

Senate Majority Leader Cathy Giessel, a Republican, told the Center for American Progress event that, after angering GOP voters by working collaboratively with Democrats, she lost her 2020 primary, held under the old election system, to a staunch conservative. Giessel had been in office since 2011.

Giessel said that when she ran again in 2022 under RCV-plus-Final-Four, her campaign didn’t even buy the database showing voters’ party affiliations that most candidates rely on to identify supporters, because she needed to target voters of all stripes. Helped by being the second choice of many Democratic voters in the general election, Giessel won back her seat.

“You’re requiring us as candidates to be much more authentic,” said Giessel of the new system. “We’re not speaking to a party platform anymore. We’re speaking to the citizens.”

Giessel now leads a bipartisan majority coalition, formed within days of the election. Members have focused on consensus issues that are priorities for voters, including boosting education funding, lowering the cost of energy and passing a balanced budget.

“We have seen much more collaboration on the budget,” said Giessel. “There’s a much more open process now, understanding that everyone needs to have input.“

An analysis by the R Street Institute, a center-right Washington, D.C. think tank, found that Alaska’s new election system “gave citizens greater choice and elevated the most broadly appealing candidates, in turn improving representation.”

Reformers in Nevada — gearing up for this year’s campaign to pass RCV-plus-Final-Five a second time after it won with 53% of the vote in 2022 — have noticed Alaska’s early success.

Over 40% of all registered voters in the Silver State aren’t affiliated with a major party, and the figure is growing. It was these voters’ frustration over being denied a voice in the state’s taxpayer-funded closed primaries that initially drove the push for reform, said Mike Draper, the communications director for Nevada Voters First, a political action committee that organized the ballot measure.

As in Alaska and elsewhere, there was also a related concern about politicians playing only to their base.

“Candidates and electeds, through no fault of their own, are not incentivized to … work to solve problems,” said Draper. “The primary incentive is to make sure they stay in the good graces either of the party, or of that fringe group that’s active in the primaries.”

Top figures in both major parties, including Nevada’s Republican governor and its two Democratic U.S. senators, oppose reform. A lawsuit brought by Democratic super-lawyer Marc Elias that aimed to keep the measure off the 2022 ballot was rejected by a judge.

‘A scheme of the Left’?

Though elected Democrats in Nevada and some other blue states have come out against reform, the most vocal opponents have been red-state Republicans and national conservative groups. They argue it would confuse voters and further reduce confidence in election results.

Some even see a progressive plot. An October analysis by the conservative Foundation for Government Accountability called RCV a “scheme of the Left to disenfranchise voters and elect more Democrats.”

Florida, Tennessee, Idaho, Montana, and South Dakota — all Republican-controlled states — have passed legislation in recent years to ban RCV. Arizona’s GOP-controlled legislature also passed an RCV ban, but it was vetoed by Gov. Katie Hobbs, a Democrat.

In Alaska, conservatives have launched a campaign to advance a ballot measure repealing their state’s reform. Palin, who has blamed the system for her loss to Peltola last year, calling it “wack,” is playing a prominent role in the effort.

Still, advocates say there are also signs of emerging interest among some Republicans in other states.

In 2022, the GOP lost several winnable statewide races after primary voters nominated extremists like Doug Mastriano in Pennsylvania and Kari Lake in Arizona. Now, some in the party think reform could allow them to advance more electable candidates.

“Even among Republicans, I’ve had my fair share of conversations where they are starting to recognize that the system isn’t putting forward candidates who are necessarily the best general election winners,” said Matt Germer, an associate director and elections fellow at the R Street Institute.

“So there’s even some growing interest among Republican electeds to say, hey, what we’re doing now is not growing our party. And if we really want to change our country, we’re going to need to grow our party, and that means appealing to enough voters to win elections.”

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U.S. House Speaker Mike Johnson, a Louisiana Republican, has been a leader in putting the Biden administration on the defensive over its efforts to combat online disinformation. (Anna Moneymaker/Getty Images)

Policy, politics and progressive commentary

Back in July, Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas testified before the U.S. House Judiciary Committee.

A federal court had recently granted a temporary injunction, in Missouri v. Biden, finding that the Biden administration had violated the First Amendment by coercing social media companies to remove content, related both to elections and the COVID-19 vaccine, that it deemed false and harmful.

The ruling is being appealed to the Supreme Court, which last month temporarily blocked the order. But one committee member wanted to press the advantage.

“What is disinformation?” asked Rep. Mike Johnson, R-La.

“Disinformation is inaccurate information…” Mayorkas began.

“Who determines what’s inaccurate?” Johnson interjected almost immediately. “Who determines what’s false? You understand the problem here?”

Moments later, Mayorkas testified that the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, a unit of DHS whose activities were part of the case, focuses on fighting disinformation from foreign adversaries — speech that would likely enjoy fewer First Amendment protections than speech by Americans.

But Johnson was ready.

“No, sir,” Johnson said. “The court determined you and all of your cohorts made no distinction between domestic speech and foreign speech. So don’t stand there under oath and tell me that you only focused on … foreign actors. That’s not true.”

“I so, so, regret that I’m out of time,” Johnson concluded.

Johnson’s forceful performance lit up right-wing media, burnishing his credentials as a a fiercely effective Republican partisan.

This was hardly the first time that Johnson had put the Biden administration on the defensive over its efforts to fight online disinformation — false or misleading information that is deliberately spread to advance a political or ideological goal. In fact, in recent years, there appear to have been few national issues on which Johnson, who in October was elected by the GOP as speaker of the House, has played a more prominent role.

Johnson’s efforts have largely succeeded. Since 2020, the federal government and social media companies have scaled back their work to counter online disinformation — thanks in part, experts say, to the furious pushback from Johnson and other leading Republicans.

Disinformation specialists increasingly worry that voters in next year’s election may have to contend with a barrage of lies flowing freely online.

“It’s going to be a wild ride,” said Sam Wineburg, a professor at the Stanford Graduate School of Education, who studies how people respond to disinformation. “We are going to see a deluge of misinformation and … a great deal of confusion online.”

A spokesman for the speaker’s office did not respond to a request for comment on the growing concerns about election-related disinformation.

Pulling back on countering disinformation

In 2020, amid a flurry of online lies about both the COVID-19 pandemic and the presidential election, social media companies stepped up their efforts to curb disinformation, including labeling some of President Donald Trump’s tweets as misleading.

These initiatives, especially the platforms’ work to limit the spread of stories about Hunter Biden’s laptop in the election’s final weeks, spurred a backlash from the right. Though information from the laptop hasn’t been shown to significantly implicate President Joe Biden, the authenticity of the laptop itself has since been confirmed

The ensuing pressure campaign by congressional Republicans like Johnson, decrying what they call censorship and collusion by government and Big Tech, has led both the Biden administration and the platforms themselves to rein in their efforts to protect voters from disinformation.

Last year, DHS announced the Disinformation Governance Board, charged with coordinating efforts to identify and counter online disinformation. Weeks later, after a fierce Republican backlash, it shuttered the panel.

CISA, the DHS agency about which Johnson grilled Mayorkas in July, has stopped reaching out to social media companies to share information, NBC News recently reported. The same outlet also reported that the FBI recently put an indefinite hold on most briefings to social media companies about Russian, Iranian, and Chinese influence campaigns. The bureau’s interactions with the platforms now must be pre-approved by government lawyers.

Another DHS program, Rumor Control, which provided quick responses to election disinformation on election night and beforehand, also appears to be on the wane, NPR reported.

The government’s retreat has upped the onus on social media companies to proactively monitor disinformation. But these efforts, too, are set to be less robust in 2024 than they were in 2020, after layoffs have reduced staffing on trust and safety teams.

Last year, Meta loosened constraints on political advertising to allow ads on Facebook and Instagram that question the legitimacy of the 2020 election, the Wall Street Journal recently reported. And X owner Elon Musk announced recently that he has eliminated the site’s elections integrity team, claiming it was “undermining election integrity.”

Experts suggest the more hands-off approach from the platforms is in part a response to the Republican outrage, which has left tech leaders reluctant to alienate powerful figures who may expand their control of the federal government just over a year from now.

“The platform leadership often felt that 2020 put them in a horrible position for potentially what the next administration might look like,” said Tim Harper, who runs the Elections and Democracy program at the Center for Democracy and Technology, which advocates for tech policies that promote democracy. “And so they’re a little bit more wary of what the political implications could be after the 2024 election.”

Meanwhile, technological advances, especially those involving generative AI, have made online disinformation much more sophisticated and harder to see through than in past elections.

“Think about where we were in 2016 and 2020,” said Wineburg, the Stanford disinformation expert. “The St. Petersburg labs spewing disinformation, often with spellings and tortured grammar — that’s gone. Just plug it into an LLM (a Large Language Model — an AI-driven algorithm that can convincingly generate human language text) and it’s going to look like it’s not only by a native speaker, but a native speaker who understands proper grammar.”

Johnson warned of ‘censorship industrial complex’

Since his ascension to the speaker job last month, Johnson’s leading role in the Republican pushback has received little attention. But, over the last year-and-a-half, he has used congressional hearings, legislation, and right wing media appearances to relentlessly warn about the dangers of what he has called the “censorship industrial complex.”

When Mayorkas announced the creation of the Disinformation Governance Board in April 2022, it was described as a working group with no operational authority. But the right was quick to paint it as an Orwellian scheme to censor political speech.

The far-right influencer Jack Posobiec, who has 1.7 million followers on X, called the panel a “Ministry of Truth” — language soon picked up by Johnson and other congressional Republicans.

“The Biden Administration’s decision to stand up a ‘Ministry of Truth,’ is dystopian in design, almost certainly unconstitutional, and clearly doomed from the start,” Johnson said in a press release announcing legislation he was introducing to defund the board. “The government has no role whatsoever in determining what constitutes truth or acceptable speech.”

A week later, in a sign that Republicans recognized the benefits of highlighting the issue, then-Speaker Kevin McCarthy introduced his own version of Johnson’s bill, with Johnson as a co-sponsor.

Johnson and other Republicans also seized on the news that the board would be run by Nina Jankowicz, a disinformation scholar. They accused Jankowicz of calling the Hunter Biden laptop a Russian influence op.

“She’s supposed to be in charge of determining what is true and what is acceptable speech, and it’s just outrageous,” Johnson told Newsmax.

In fact, Jankowicz, while live-tweeting a 2020 presidential debate, had noted that Biden referred to a letter by former national security leaders stating their belief that the laptop was a Russian influence op. In the runup to the election, however, Jankowicz did elsewhere cast doubt on the laptop’s authenticity.

Jankowicz was targeted with abuse and death threats, and within weeks she had resigned. When, not long after, the board was shuttered entirely, it was perhaps Republicans’ most concrete victory on the issue.

But Johnson hasn’t let the subject drop. In March, he appeared on Fox News to discuss a subpoena issued to Jankowicz by a newly formed House subcommittee on weaponization of the federal government, chaired by Ohio Republican Rep. Jim Jordan, to which Johnson had been named.

“We have a lot of questions about the foundation of (the disinformation board),” Johnson said. “How were they going to determine what is so-called disinformation? What were they going to do with this? It’s pretty scary. We have to make sure that this never ever happens again.”

Later that same month, the subcommittee held a hearing aimed at promoting Missouri v. Biden, the lawsuit filed by Republican attorneys general in Missouri and Louisiana that challenged the Biden administration’s efforts to work with social media companies to control disinformation.

“The executive branch has undertaken a broad campaign to censor the American people,” Johnson declared. “That’s the headline. That’s the takeaway today.”

In May, at another hearing of the Select Subcommittee on the Weaponization of Government, this one focused on the FBI, Johnson said the bureau “worked with the social media platforms hand in hand, almost as partners over the last two election cycles, to censor and silence conservatives online that they disagreed with.”

At yet another hearing In July, not long after the federal court ruling that the bureau and other agencies had violated the First Amendment, Johnson grilled FBI director Christopher Wray.

Like Mayorkas, Wray said his agency focused on disinformation from foreign adversaries.

“That’s not accurate,” Johnson jumped in. “You need to read this court opinion because you’re in charge of enforcing it … (It) wasn’t just foreign adversaries, sir, it was American citizens. How do you answer for this?”

That same month, Johnson teamed up with Jordan and Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky., to introduce more legislation on the subject. The Free Speech Protection Act would bar executive branch employees from censoring protected speech and impose “mandatory severe penalties” on executive branch employees who censor protected speech. The bill has not advanced in the House.

“The dystopian scheme by the government, Big Tech, academia, and many NGOs to censor American citizens and silence conservative voices is far-reaching and dangerous,” said Johnson.

The outrage generated by Johnson and his colleagues has had an impact. As the 2024 election looms, experts say, those looking to undermine elections by using false information to confuse voters online are in a stronger position than ever — not least because they will have had four more years to perfect their craft.

“There are people who are highly incentivized to harm our democracy by raising doubt about elections, and they have been actively organizing and raising money over the last three years,” David Becker, the founder and executive director for the Center on Election Innovation and Research, which works with election officials to improve election administration and build voter trust, recently told States Newsroom. “In 2020, those that were trying to undermine that election were largely making it up as they went along with crazy legal theories and chasing bizarre pieces of disinformation. They are going to be better prepared.”

Correction: This report has been corrected to more accurately reflect the nature of Nina Jankowicz’s public comments  about the Hunter Biden laptop.

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The U.S Capitol Building ahead of inaugural ceremonies for President Joe Biden on Jan. 18, 2021 in Washington, D.C. A year from now, the nation’s voters will decide another presidential contest — likely one that pits the same two candidates against each other. (Joe Raedle/Getty Images)

Policy, politics and progressive commentary

The last time America elected a president, it led to a deadly assault on the U.S. Capitol and a failed coup that gravely damaged the political system and marred the peaceful transfer of power for the first time in U.S. history.

A year from now, the nation’s voters will decide another presidential contest — likely one that pits the same two candidates against each other.

Despite a slew of arrests and felony convictions stemming from the events of Jan. 6, 2021, there’s little sign that those who attacked democracy last time have significantly moderated their outlook.

Former President Donald Trump has warned that, if restored to power, he’ll seek retribution against his enemies. An unrepentant election denier runs one house of Congress. Threats of political violence, now commonplace, are said to have affected key voting decisions made by elected officials. And 3 out of 4 respondents to a recent poll think American democracy is at risk in the election, with nearly a quarter saying patriots may have to use violence to save the country.

“The United States electoral process, and indeed American democracy itself, is under great stress,” warned a September report by a group of election experts for the Safeguarding Democracy Project. “No longer can we take for granted that people will accept election results as legitimate.”

Since the tumult of January 2021, politicians, advocacy groups, and media outlets have rightly warned about a range of threats to a free and fair 2024 election — from problems with voter access and election administration to the potential for violence and chaos, or outright subversion of results, in the post-election period.

Perhaps less noticed has been the progress made toward shoring up the system — chiefly in the form of federal legislation making it harder to subvert a presidential election.

That’s why, with a year before voting culminates next November, it’s crucial to take stock of where the nation stands, and to identify where, in the view of election experts and voter advocates, the major vulnerabilities remain.

Election subversion

Perhaps the fear that looms largest in many observers’ minds is a repeat in some form of the failed, multi-pronged plot to overturn the election that culminated with the Jan. 6, 2021 attack — but one that succeeds this time.

For some, the recent ascension of Rep. Mike Johnson, R-La., to the role of speaker of the House adds to the sense of anxiety.

The New York Times has called Johnson “the most important architect” of congressional Republicans’ objections to the 2020 election results. Soon after the election, Johnson rallied 125 other GOP representatives to sign a legal brief arguing that President Joe Biden’s win should be overturned.

The Louisiana Republican then led the effort to get Republicans to refuse to certify the results, and he voted against certification in Arizona and Pennsylvania.

Johnson has never expressed regret for his role in the bid to overturn the results, or acknowledged that Biden was the legitimate winner.

“Johnson’s record on democracy is overtly dangerous, and his newfound power presents an acute threat to American elections,” an Oct. 26 email from a Democratic group of chief election officials, the Democratic Association of Secretaries of State, warned reporters.

There’s little doubt that having a leading election denier running the House is damaging to U.S. democracy in myriad ways — not least by further mainstreaming a dangerous ideology.

But, asked at an Oct. 25 news conference whether he was afraid that Johnson would try to overturn the election, Biden answered: “No.”

“Just like I was not worried that the last guy would be able to overturn the election,” Biden continued. “They had about 60 lawsuits and they all went to the Supreme Court and every time they lost. I understand the Constitution.”

Election law experts largely agree, noting that the speaker has no formal role in the certification process. And, they point out, it takes a full vote of both chambers to actually reject electoral votes — making it highly unlikely to succeed. For all the justified concern about what happened in 2020, no objection to a state’s electoral votes got more than seven votes in the Senate.

As important, experts say, the Electoral Count Reform Act, approved last year in response to Jan. 6, makes it all but impossible for Congress to overturn an election, no matter who’s in charge.

“The ability of Congress to interfere in the certification of a presidential election was already limited,” said Adav Noti, senior vice president and legal director of the Campaign Legal Center, which helped push for the ECRA. With the reform in place, Noti added, ”it’s even harder now for Congress to do anything other than properly certify the election.”

The ECRA, which reformed the outdated Electoral Count Act of 1887, made clear that the vice president’s role in certification is purely ministerial. He or she has no authority to reject a state’s electoral votes, as Jan. 6 rioters hoped to pressure Vice President Mike Pence to do.

More important, the ECRA laid out a judicial process for states to resolve disputes over electoral votes before they reach Congress. And it barred members of Congress from objecting to electoral votes that have already been approved by that judicial process — ensuring, essentially, that federal courts, not partisan politicians in Washington or the states, are in control.

That same provision of the law also addressed another avenue for subversion: State lawmakers or officials could corrupt their state’s vote count long before Congress meets, by changing election rules after the fact or just appointing electors directly.

Trump and his allies schemed to do that in 2020, by pressing legislatures to declare a “failed election” and substitute their own slates. Since then, lawmakers in Wisconsin, North Carolina, and Georgia, among other states, have moved to gain more control over elections, raising concerns about the possibility for state-level subversion.

But under the ECRA, states must appoint their electors according to state laws that existed before the election. That makes state-level subversion much harder.

“There was a fear that state legislatures would come in afterwards and appoint the electors they want anyway,” said Edward B. Foley, an election law professor at Ohio State University and an expert on the Electoral College. “That can’t be done under the ECRA.”

Chaos and delay

But though the law on paper is clear, Foley said he worries about a massive glut of election litigation, all filed in the immediate pre- and post-election period in one close, pivotal state.

The result, and perhaps the intention, could be to overwhelm the courts, potentially delaying decisions until a state risks missing the Dec. 11 “safe harbor” deadline. That could mean its electoral votes might not be counted.

“The American judiciary is not built for thousands and thousands of hours of attention to election matters,” said Foley. “So I think there are reasons to fear that something really gets out of hand in terms of litigation, and you start bumping up against those deadlines.”

That threat could be exacerbated by a little-noticed aspect of the Supreme Court’s June ruling in a major elections case, Moore v. Harper.

The court rejected the claim, pushed by conservatives, that state legislatures have essentially free rein to make election rules, unconstrained by state courts. But, as the election law scholar Rick Hasen has noted, the justices did give themselves the power to second-guess state courts if they decide state courts went too far in regulating an election.

This authority, Hasen has written, is going to be “hanging out there, a new tool to be used to rein in especially voter-protective rulings of state courts. Every expansion of voting rights in the context of federal litigation will now yield a potential second federal lawsuit with uncertain results.”

Those statutory deadlines that Foley worries about also concern David Becker, the executive director of the Center for Election Innovation and Research.

He warns that election deniers — including grifters looking to exploit Trump voters’ fears of a stolen election for financial gain — will be even more effective this time at sowing disinformation if their candidate loses on election night. That could lead to even more, and more unpredictable, political violence.

“Instead of having it be focused on just one place at one time — the Capitol on January 6th — we could see it focused on the counting process, the certification process, on the meeting of the Electoral College, at various points in time in various places,” said Becker, a leading expert on election administration. “From talking to people around the country, there is a concern about efforts to basically undermine the will of the people.”

That kind of chaos could bog things down enough that the election’s statutory deadlines — the safe harbor deadline, the meeting of the Electoral College six days later, and the Jan. 6 certification by Congress — come into play and force a halt to the process. Indeed, Becker noted, that appears to have been part of the Trump team’s strategy last time around.

“The effort to string this out and delay until the winning candidate has his hand on the Bible on the steps of the Capitol — that’s almost certainly going to happen,” said Becker. “They’re going to do everything they can to slow down the mechanics of elections.”

Voter suppression

It may seem quaint in an era when there are fears about outright subversion. But perhaps the simplest way a free and fair election might be compromised is through old-fashioned voter suppression — something that many Democrats would argue already happened not too long ago.

An October report by the Voting Rights Lab, a voter advocacy group that tracks voting laws across the country, found that voters will face “significant new restrictions” in four key swing states: Georgia, New Hampshire, North Carolina, and Wisconsin. (A fifth swing state, Pennsylvania, will have both restrictive and expansive new voting laws in place.)

“Swing state voters often determine the outcome of our presidential elections,” said Liz Avore, a senior policy adviser for the group. “Millions of those voters will see new rules in 2024 — many restricting access to popular options like early and mail voting. How they respond could just be the difference in a tight presidential race.”

In all five of those states, it will be harder to vote by mail than it was in 2020.

North Carolina might have gone furthest in restricting mail voting. A strict photo ID law, passed in 2018 but newly approved by the state Supreme Court, requires that mail-in ballots, which already had to be notarized or signed by two witnesses, must also include a copy of a photo ID.

A different law passed this year by the state requires that mail ballots be received by 7:30 p.m. on Election Day, where previously they only had to be postmarked by Election Day and received by three days after. In 2020, 11,000 ballots arrived at election offices in those three days, according to figures provided by the Brennan Center.

In Georgia, the state with the smallest margin of victory last time, new rules require voters to provide a specific ID number both when they apply for and when they return a mail-in ballot. There are also tighter rules on when and where ballot drop boxes will be available. And residents are now allowed to challenge the eligibility of an unlimited number of voters, potentially overloading election officials with meritless challenges. Last year, 92,000 registrations were reportedly challenged.

Wisconsin, another state that could be pivotal, also made mail voting harder. State Supreme Court rulings have banned ballot drop boxes and barred third parties from returning mail ballots — restrictions that weren’t in place in 2020.

But that might not be the last word. The court now has a liberal majority, and a new lawsuit seeks to reinstate drop boxes, as well as expanding access to mail voting in other ways.

In Pennsylvania, as in North Carolina, mail-in ballots must now be received by Election Day to be counted. In 2020, in an accommodation to COVID-19, they only needed to be postmarked by Election Day.

Still, that restrictive change could be canceled out by an expansive one: This year, the state began automatically registering voters who have contact with the state DMV unless they opt out, making it easier to get on the rolls.

And New Hampshire will have some of the most antiquated and restrictive voting rules in the nation next year. Thanks to the expiration of COVID-19-era accommodations that temporarily expanded access to mail-in and early voting, most voters will have no other option than voting in person on Election Day — something that’s the case in only two other states.

It’s always hard to gauge just how many voters will be affected by new voting laws. Indeed, scholars increasingly appear to agree that changes to voting rules affect outcomes only in the very closest races.

But Biden won Georgia in 2020 by fewer than 12,000 votes, and Wisconsin by just over 20,000. If those or any of the other states with restrictive new laws are equally close next year, it could be hard to rule out the possibility that these measures — which are generally thought to affect more Democratic voters than Republican ones — made the difference.

That likely wouldn’t trigger the kind of national crisis that a conflict over electoral votes at the Capitol would. But it would compromise the election, and further undermine democracy, nonetheless.

Still, too much hand-wringing over the laws could be counter-productive.

Becker suggested that the biggest impact of these restrictive laws could be to deter infrequent voters by conveying the message — in most cases, false — that voting is arduous and there’s an organized effort to stop you from going to the polls.

“Those messages are going to make it less likely for an infrequent voter to show up,” said Becker, noting that Trump allies’ claims that the system had been rigged by widespread illegal voting may have worked to depress Republican turnout in the 2021 Georgia U.S. Senate runoffs.

“The best way to suppress a vote is to get the voter to suppress themselves.”

Election administration troubles

It’s worth remembering that, despite the chaos and violence of the post-election period in 2020-21, the voting itself confounded some predictions by going remarkably smoothly.

Facing the twin challenges of a pandemic and a concerted campaign by the incumbent to sow distrust over fraud, election administrators nationwide provided an accessible, secure process that featured the highest turnout since the 1890s — a genuine triumph of democracy.

Still, three years later, the U.S. elections infrastructure is under strain. A mass exodus of local election officials, caused in part by a barrage of threats and intimidation from denialists, has made headlines and sparked concern.

Pennsylvania, North Carolina, Virginia, and Texas are all said to have had top officials leave. And a recent report by the good-government group Issue One found that 160 chief local election officials in 11 Western states — around 40% of all chief local election officials in those states — have left their jobs since November 2020.

The report singled out the region’s two swing states, Arizona and Nevada — both hotspots for denialism and threats of violence against administrators — as especially hard hit by the departures.

“As a former county recorder myself, I can attest that the pre-2020 world for election administrators is gone,” Arizona Secretary of State Adrian Fontes said at a Nov. 1 U.S. Senate hearing. “We don’t feel safe in our work because of the harassment and threats that are based in lies.”

Fontes, a Democrat, called the issue a “threat to American democracy.”

But, while everyone agrees threats and harassment targeting election officials are a serious concern, fears about the impact on 2024 may be overblown.

Becker, who works closely with election officials across the country, noted that in both states, the key counties that have seen departures have found effective replacements. In Arizona, both Maricopa and Pima counties have elected recorders who have prioritized nonpartisan election management and voter access.

And when the respected elections director for Clark County, Nevada stepped down, he was replaced by a deputy who had worked in the office for 25 years.

“Although I have many concerns about the election, one of them is not whether the election officials are going to manage an accessible, secure process,” said Becker. “I think election officials will do what they have always done, which is to rise above this and provide an easy convenient way for all eligible voters to vote, and a transparent method for counting those ballots that stands up to scrutiny.”

Still, the task of administrators could be complicated by the presence at the polls of self-appointed voter fraud watchdogs. Responding to Trump’s lies about illegal voting, conservative activists are mobilizing to scour the voting process for evidence of irregularities.

One nationwide coalition of groups organized by a top Trump election lawyer, the Election Integrity Network, is working to recruit and train activists to serve as poll-watchers and on local elections boards. In Virginia’s 2021 election — the first contest where the group was active — it trained 45,000 poll watchers and officials and covered 85% of polling places, it has said.

Voting rights advocates worry that aggressive poll-watchers could intimidate voters or overwhelm officials with meritless voter challenges, slowing down the voting process.

Democrats are blunter. “The goal is to disenfranchise enough voters that they can win the election,” a staffer for the Virginia Democrats told the New York Times in reference to the group’s activities in the state’s current election.

Yet more potential problems

These are far from the only things that could go wrong. One wildcard that’s causing concern is the possibility of a “contingent election”.

The “No Labels” party has launched a well-funded campaign in support of a bipartisan “unity ticket’. If it succeeds in winning one or more states, the upshot could be to deny either major-party candidate 270 electoral votes. Even if No Labels fails to win a state, an Electoral College tie would also leave both candidates one vote short of 270.

If no one reaches 270, the Constitution requires Congress to choose the president. But no law governs how that process would work. The result, two advocates for Protect Democracy wrote recently, based on conversations with constitutional scholars, would be “chaos and crisis.”

Another threat that’s causing alarm among some election security advocates stems from the multi-state effort by Trump allies to access software used in voting machines. In Colorado, Pennsylvania, Georgia, and Michigan, activists worked with election officials or law enforcement to gain access to the software.

Most experts say it isn’t likely that they could change votes at a scale large enough to affect the outcome of a presidential election — in part because every swing state now uses paper ballots as a backup so that results can be verified.

The more realistic worry is that hackers could draw attention to a breach in order to stoke anger and controversy, giving the election loser additional ammunition to claim that the result was rigged. That might not subvert results, but would help undermine the election’s legitimacy in the eyes of some voters.

One leading democracy advocate has a very different fear: that the election will be legitimate, but that its result will nonetheless put our system of government at risk.

“We are not out of the woods, but that danger (of election subversion) has been greatly reduced,” Ian Bassin, the founder and executive director of Protect Democracy, and the recent recipient of a MacArthur “genius” grant, said in an October podcast interview.

“The bigger danger is that an autocrat will simply win the 2024 election.”

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(Photo: Carl Payne/Colorado Newsline)

Policy, politics and progressive commentary

Lately, a rough consensus has emerged among people who study the impact of voting policies: Though they often spark fierce partisan fighting, most changes to voting laws do little to affect overall turnout, much less election results.

But one fast-growing reform appears to stand out as an exception.

When every registered voter gets sent a ballot in the mail — a system known as universal vote-by-mail — voting rates tend to rise, numerous studies have found.

Advocates for mail voting say these findings haven’t gotten the attention they deserve, and that they should lead more states that want to boost turnout to adopt UVM, as it’s called.

“[T]o a remarkable degree, most of the nation’s leading journalists, democracy reform organizations, and elected officials continue to largely ignore, downplay — or even dismiss outright – the potentially profound implications of these noticeably high turnout rates,” said a research paper released last month by the National Vote at Home Institute, which advocates for increased use of mail voting.

Currently, eight states — California, Colorado, Hawaii, Nevada, Oregon, Utah, Vermont, and Washington — use UVM.

Vote by mail attacked by Trump

Efforts in recent years by many states to make it easier to vote by mail prompted a furious backlash from former President Donald Trump and his backers, who have repeatedly claimed, without evidence, that mail voting is dangerously vulnerable to fraud.

Perhaps no state incurred Trump’s wrath more than Nevada, which, along with California, introduced UVM in 2020 in response to the pandemic.

“The governor of Nevada should not be in charge of ballots. The ballots are going to be a disaster for our country,” Trump said ahead of the 2020 election, referring to the state’s then-governor, Democrat Steve Sisolak (In fact, Sisolak was not “in charge of ballots.” Secretary of State Barbara Cegavske, a Republican, was). “You’re going to have problems with the ballots like nobody has ever seen before.”

Since replacing Sisolak this year, Nevada Gov. Joe Lombardo, a Republican, has pushed for eliminating UVM. (“Sending ballots to more than 1.9 million registered voters is inefficient and unnecessary,” Lombardo said in January.) But Democrats, who control the state legislature, have shown no interest in scrapping the system.

So great was the GOP’s suspicion of the practice in 2022 that some voters were told by party activists to hold onto mail ballots and hand them in on Election Day at their polling place, rather than mailing them.

But Trump and Republicans have lately backtracked, telling supporters to take advantage of mail voting rather than handing an advantage to Democrats. In June, the Republican National Committee announced a new get-out-the-vote drive encouraging early and mail voting.

States tinker with mail voting

Still, over 20 states have sought to restrict mail voting since 2020. Ohio has shortened the timeframe to apply for mail ballots and imposed new signature requirements, while Arizona now removes people from its list to receive a mail ballot if they go for more than two years without voting.

Among states looking to expand mail voting, not all have gone as far as UVM. Both New York and Pennsylvania, among other states, have loosened their rules to allow anyone to cast an absentee ballot by mail, rather than requiring an excuse — a system known as no-excuse absentee. But the voter still must take the trouble to apply to receive their absentee ballot, rather than being mailed one automatically.

Experts say there isn’t strong evidence that these more modest approaches to mail voting do much to boost turnout

Other reforms that likewise have become core to the Democratic platform on voting policy, like adding early voting opportunities, also haven’t consistently been shown to increase voting rates. Allowing people to register at the polls — often called same-day registration — has in some studies been associated with small turnout increases.

By contrast, the research on UVM finds a consistent and significant impact.

Advocates say that’s hardly surprising. Under UVM, election officials simply mail ballots to directly everyone on the voter rolls, almost literally putting a ballot in voters’ hands. Voters can return their ballot either through the mail or by leaving it in a secure ballot dropbox.

Research studies

A 2022 paper by Eric McGhee and Jennifer Paluch of the Public Policy Institute of California and Mindy Romero of the University of Southern California found that UVM increased turnout among registered voters by 5.6 percentage points in the 2020 election — what the authors called “a substantial and robust positive effect.”

A 2018 paper by the data firm Pantheon Analytics, which works for Democrats and progressive groups, compared Utah counties that used UVM with those that didn’t, and found that the system boosted turnout by 5-7 percentage points among registered voters.

And a forthcoming paper by Michael Ritter of Washington State University, to be published in the November 2023 edition of the Election Law Journal, looks at various mail voting systems over the last decade and finds that UVM led to an 8-point increase in registered voter turnout.

By and large, states that use UVM appear to see higher voting rates than those that don’t. The National Vote at Home Institute research paper found that eight of the 11 states that used UVM in 2020 were in the top 15 states for turnout of active registered voters. And none of those eight were battleground states, which tend to see higher turnout.

Two other states using UVM for the first time in 2020 ranked first and second on improved turnout compared to 2016 — Hawaii, which saw a 14% jump, and Utah, which saw an 11% jump.

The paper also found that UVM has a particularly large impact on turnout rates for young voters, Black and Latino voters, who tend to vote at lower rates than average.

No advantage for one party

Advocates say there’s another reason why policymakers should have no reluctance to embrace UVM: Despite its impact on turnout, it doesn’t help one party more than the other, according to numerous studies.

“Universal VBM does not appear to tilt turnout toward the Democratic party, nor does it appear to affect election outcomes meaningfully,” a representative 2020 paper by a group of Stanford University political scientists concluded.

McGhee said that finding could have the effect of turning down the political heat on the issue.

“Hopefully as the evidence gets out that it boosts turnout without impacting partisan outcomes, that part of it will fade a little bit,” he said. “And it’ll just be seen as a good-government reform.”

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Mike Pence, Ron DeSantis, and Vivek Ramaswamy at the Republican debate. (Photo by Win McNamee/Getty Images)

Policy, politics and progressive commentary

There’s a growing feeling, among both experts and ordinary Americans, that our democracy isn’t functioning well — and even that it’s under threat.

“American democracy is cracking,” the Washington Post reported August 18.

“I’m terrified,” one democracy expert told the paper. “I think we are in bad shape, and I don’t know a way out.”

Forty-nine percent of respondents to a recent Associated Press poll said U.S. democracy isn’t working well, and 56% said the Republican party is doing a bad job of upholding democracy. For the Democratic party, the figure was 47%.

And just 16% of respondents to a 2022 CNN poll said they were very confident that U.S. election results reflected the will of the people.

But viewers of Wednesday night’s GOP primary presidential debate on Fox News wouldn’t have guessed any of this.

Though the network’s on-screen banner and backdrop read “Fox News Democracy 24,” the eight candidates onstage weren’t asked about elections, voting, or democracy throughout the two-hour production. Former President Donald Trump, the front runner, refused to participate and opted for a separate online interview with fired Fox News host Tucker Carlson.

The debate moderators, Fox’s Brett Baier and Martha MacCallum, did find time to get the candidates’ views not only on the economy, education, immigration, and the war in Ukraine, but also about transgender girls playing high school sports and even the evidence for UFOs.

The debate did touch on a few issues that have implications for democracy.

Both entrepreneur Vivek Ramaswamy and Sen. Tim Scott, R-S.C., railed against what they called the “weaponization” of the Department of Justice for prosecuting Trump over his attempt to stay in power after losing the election, and his effort to hold onto classified government documents after he left office.

And several candidates, including Scott, former New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie, former U.N. ambassador Nikki Haley, and (grudgingly) Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis said when asked by the moderators that former Vice President Mike Pence, another candidate on stage, did the right thing when he resisted Trump’s pressure not to certify the 2020 results.

“Mike Pence stood for the Constitution,” said Christie. “And he deserves not grudging credit, he deserves our thanks as Americans for putting his oath of office and the Constitution of the United States before personal, political, and unfair pressure.”

But there was no discussion at all of elections or voting policy. That omission was all the more noticeable because, on the state level, the last two-and-a-half years have seen a rush to pass laws that make major changes to the election process — often, on the GOP side, the result of intense pressure from party activists and voters, who believed Trump’s lies about fraud in the 2020 election and demanded that lawmakers tighten the rules.

Many of these new measures, which have overhauled everything from how votes are cast to how they’re counted to how elections offices are funded, were drafted with help from the growing network of Washington-based think tanks and advocacy groups focused on election issues, several featuring high-profile GOP former elected officials.

And last month, U.S. House Republicans used a public hearing in Atlanta to release a sweeping 224-page elections bill which Democrats called the most restrictive in decades. That legislation was passed 8-4 by the U.S. House Administration Committee in July but has not yet received a vote in the full House.

One possible reason that elections policy was absent entirely from Wednesday night’s debate: In April, Fox News paid over $787 million to settle a defamation lawsuit filed by the voting machine company Dominion, in connection with the broadcaster’s promotion of lies about the 2020 election. Since then the network has mostly steered clear of the issue.

While the moderators asked the questions, any of the candidates could have chosen to bring up elections issues on their own, but didn’t.

And that choice may reflect a new reality about the politics of the issue: Though Republican voters strongly support stricter voting rules, after Jan. 6 the anti-voter-fraud crusade that Trump sought to lead has perhaps become too controversial for presidential candidates to put at the center of their pitch to voters.

Of course, it’s a long campaign, and the candidates will have a second chance to talk to voters about democracy when they debate again on Sept. 27 at the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library in California.

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The study by political scientists from Stanford and Tufts universities appears just as a heated debate is flaring again in Congress over the partisan and racial impact of recent voting laws. (Photo by Stephen Maturen/Getty Images)

Policy, politics and progressive commentary

In recent years, U.S. politics has been consumed by partisan fights over states’ election policies.

But a new study by two political scientists is causing a stir by finding that state legislators’ changes to election laws — both those that tighten election rules in the name of integrity, and those that loosen rules to expand access — have almost no impact on which side wins.

“Contemporary election reforms that are purported to increase or decrease turnout tend to have negligible effects on election outcomes,” write the authors, Justin Grimmer and Eitan Hersh, political scientists at Stanford University and Tufts University, respectively, in “How Election Rules Affect Who Wins,” which was published online as a working paper June 29.

These laws, the authors write, “have small effects on outcomes because they tend to target small shares of the electorate, have a small effect on turnout, and/or affect voters who are relatively balanced in their partisanship.”

That doesn’t mean these laws don’t matter. Many advocates, as well as the authors themselves, say there are plenty of reasons beyond partisanship to care about voting policy — not least the effect some can have on non-white voters.

“If we can take the temperature down on some of these issues and separate the partisan consequences from some of the other consequences, the public discussion would actually be a lot better,” Hersh said in a phone interview. “Right now, it seems like one of the reasons this stuff is toxic is because every minor thing, from having mail voting to having voter ID, is treated as some democracy-ending reform. And I think that’s quite dangerous.”

Indeed, Grimmer and Hersh’s conclusion, which is largely supported by other recent research, is at odds with the behavior of much of the political and advocacy worlds.

In recent years, the parties and outside groups have poured countless dollars and hours into the battles over voting, seeking to gain an electoral edge, stop their opponents from getting one, or fight voter suppression. Now, some are asking: What does the emerging consensus that these laws have minimal effects on election outcomes mean for that ongoing work?

Elections bill in House 

The study appears just as a heated debate is flaring again in Congress over the partisan and racial impact of recent voting laws.

On July 10, at a U.S. House Administration Committee field hearing in Atlanta, Republican lawmakers unveiled the American Confidence in Elections Act, new legislation that would tighten voting rules in numerous ways.

To make the case for the measure, the GOPers repeatedly criticized Democrats for predicting that Georgia’s 2021 election law, which imposed stricter rules on several types of voting, would suppress votes, especially among minorities. (“The left lied,” declared a GOP video on the issue that was shown at the hearing.)

Republicans noted that the state’s turnout in fact went up last year — though Democrats countered that Black turnout had gone down relative to white turnout.

Grimmer, a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution, served as an expert witness for Georgia in its defense of the law after the state was sued by the U.S. Department of Justice and voting-rights groups.

Meanwhile, some in the trenches of the voting wars reject the new study’s conclusions out of hand.

“Republicans are targeting the rules of voting because they know they matter,” said the Democratic super-lawyer Marc Elias — who filed the first lawsuit against the Georgia measure — in a statement to States Newsroom. “Studies of cherry-picked practices from years and decades ago may be interesting to some political scientists but they don’t solve the problem of armed vigilantes at drop boxes or states changing laws to make voter registration more difficult.”

As the conventional wisdom has it, laws that restrict access tend to help Republicans, since those most likely to be blocked or deterred by stricter rules — often racial minorities, students, renters and low-income Americans — lean Democratic. And laws that make voting easier, the idea goes, tend to boost Democrats, since the people likely to be helped by them similarly lean Democratic.

Indeed, Republican-led states have lined up to pass restrictive new voting laws, while fighting Democratic efforts to pass expansive laws. Democrats have done the reverse — including raising hundreds of millions of dollars to file court challenges to the GOP’s measures. And at election time, both sides have mobilized vast armies of volunteers to hunt for fraud, or protect voting rights, at the polls.

Politicians have been quick to blame election rules for defeats. Hillary Clinton has said, with little evidence, that between 27,000 and 200,000 Wisconsin voters “were turned away from the polls” in the 2016 presidential election because of the state’s ID requirement. Former President Donald Trump has gone much further, frequently blaming his 2020 loss on loose voting rules that, he falsely claims, enable fraud.

Advocates and much of the media have likewise prioritized the issue, seeing a chance to hold powerful actors accountable, protect or expand access to the political process, or spotlight a set of urgent challenges to U.S. democracy.

But Grimmer and Hersh describe this Sturm und Drang — at least the part that’s focused on partisan outcomes — as a tempest in a teapot.

“The caustic rhetoric that suggests the partisan stakes for election administration reform are very high is detached from empirical reality,” Grimmer and Hersh write. “Even very close elections are decided by margins larger than the magnitude of election reforms we examine in this paper.”

Little evidence of impact on results

Though that finding may surprise political operatives, advocates, and journalists, academic experts say it’s very much in sync with existing research on the issue — making the Grimmer-Hersh study much harder to dismiss as an outlier.

Scholars have struggled to find evidence that changes like early voting and election-day registration have significantly boosted turnout. (One possible exception is mail voting, where at least one recent study did find significant effects, while others didn’t.)

Nor have most studies found that even very controversial restrictive measures do much to lower voting rates. A 2019 paper released by the National Bureau of Economic Research found that strict voter ID laws “are unlikely to have a meaningful impact on turnout or election outcomes.” And a paper published this year by two Notre Dame political scientists found that ID laws “motivate and mobilize supporters of both parties, ultimately mitigating their anticipated effects on election results.”

The Grimmer-Hersh study tries to clarify why the partisan effects are so negligible. Unlike most earlier studies, it doesn’t look only at one type of law — voter ID laws, for example — but rather on the entire category of election laws that might affect turnout, including both those that make voting harder and those that make it easier.

The authors give an example of a hypothetical law that imposes additional requirements for voting, targeting Democratic-leaning groups.

The requirements target 4% of the electorate, and cause a 3 percentage-point decline in turnout among this group — figures that the authors say are consistent with the effects of real laws. The result would be a 0.12 percentage point drop in overall turnout.

That’s already small, but because that group is likely to be around 60% Democratic, not 100%, the swing toward Republicans would be even smaller, just 0.011 percentage points. Only the very closest elections in history would be affected by a swing that tiny.

Even laws that contain several prongs that affect voting in different ways are still likely to affect results only in the very tightest elections, the authors write. North Carolina’s omnibus elections bill currently moving through the legislature there is an example, though it isn’t mentioned in the study.

In one section that may raise the hackles of voting-rights advocates, the authors note that there has been no significant turnout decline in the mostly Southern states that were affected by the Supreme Court’s 2013 ruling in Shelby County v. Holder, which removed the requirement for those states to have their election changes pre-approved by the federal government, to ensure they don’t hurt minority voting. In fact, they say, voting rates among non-whites have increased since the ruling.

Advocates and journalists — including this one! — have poured resources into documenting the slew of restrictive new rules, from voter ID laws to reductions in polling sites, that were imposed in the wake of Shelby, at times painting the onslaught as an urgent crisis of democracy.

Even far-reaching structural reforms that go beyond targeted measures like voter ID may not do much to affect election outcomes, the paper suggests.

Many predicted that the 1993 National Voter Registration Act, which has added millions to the rolls by requiring motor vehicles departments and other state agencies to offer registration, would help Democrats, the authors note. (“Who wins under this bill?” asked Rep. Spencer Bachus, an Alabama Republican, during the debate over the measure. The law, he answered, “will result in the registration of millions of welfare recipients, illegal aliens, and taxpayer-funded entitlement recipients. They’ll win.”)

In fact, the authors write, the law had essentially no partisan impact.

‘Beyond the voting wars’

Still, some critics note that many high-profile elections these days, including presidential elections, are decided by razor-thin margins. In both of the last two presidential elections, the winner won three pivotal states by 1.2 percentage points or less — in 2020, it was 0.7 percentage points or less. (And that’s leaving aside Florida 2000, a unicorn event that was so close that almost everything made a difference.)

“[U]sing the Hersh-Grimmer framework, some of these laws would’ve had a plausible chance of swinging the 2016 presidential election because the election was so close,” said Jacob Grumbach, a professor of political science at the University of Washington, via email. “ I could understand people might think that’s a big deal.”

Hersh acknowledged it’s possible that a multi-pronged law, or a set of laws acting together, could cause a swing that big. But he argued that because of the high level of uncertainty involved in the analysis, there’s no reliable way to predict what the partisan effects of a given law will be.

“Yeah, collectively these small policies could aggregate,” Hersh said. “But no one knows how they aggregate. Even the ones that liberals call suppression.”

“There’s no way lawmakers can sit around and be like, ‘OK, we’re going to do these six things and this is going to help Democrats or Republicans,’ and actually know what they’re talking about,” Hersh added.

The authors also acknowledge more than once that there are plenty of valid reasons to worry about election policies that have nothing to do with results —  “such as whether they make voting convenient, more secure, more cost effective, and whether they are motivated by discriminatory intent.” All of those effects would be important to pay attention to, even if they didn’t have a partisan impact.

In fact, both Grimmer and Hersh stressed in interviews that one goal of the paper was to encourage a focus on these other issues by making questions of partisanship recede.

​”States should be seeking out policies that they think will improve the functioning of elections,” said Grimmer. “And they can be comforted knowing that when they make those changes, it’s not going to end up with wild swings in partisan balance.”

Others see a different take-away from the paper.

David Nickerson, a political science professor at Temple University in Philadelphia, was involved in a project that looked at the impact of stadium voting, which took place in the 2020 election at over 48 professional sports stadiums as a convenience measure during the pandemic. Nickerson said project organizers hoped that when they showed stadium voting has no partisan effect, Republican officials would drop their opposition to it.

But that didn’t happen, Nickerson said. The experience suggests to him that differences over how elections should be run — and in particular over how easy or hard voting should be — are as much about ideological principle as they are about political advantage.

“You’ll even hear Republicans openly say they think voting should be harder, and you should only vote if you really want to and care and are committed — which I can’t imagine a Democratic official saying,” Nickerson said. “It’s a different worldview.”

Michael Morse, a professor at the University of Pennsylvania Carey Law School, said the study should lead advocates to focus relatively less on laws that affect the individual voting experience, like most voter ID laws, and more on structural issues, like getting more people on the voter rolls, or stopping gerrymandering.

“We have a limited amount of resources for reform,” Morse said. “The agenda for reform should be informed by this type of empirical political science.”

Indeed, the reality that election laws barely affect results is a good thing for building bipartisan coalitions for voting rights, Morse added.

“I would like the public discussion of these issues to be less partisan,” he said. “It’s the only way forward beyond the voting wars.”

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