Roughly two years after pandemic-related changes to voting laws caused controversy and confusion, some states are continuing to reform their rules ahead of the Nov. 8 midterm elections.
Some have sought to scale back the accommodations made for voters wary of COVID-19. Others have worked to make permanent the expanded voting options that debuted in 2020.
Democrats have fiercely resisted any reforms perceived to limit ballot access, even, at points this year and last, elevating the voting rights issue to a top priority for the party.
National Democrats have since largely abandoned the fight to activists on the Left who have been the most vocal about it. President Joe Biden placed Vice President Kamala Harris in charge of leading a legislative push that would have codified many of the reforms Democrats are now seeking at the state level, but the effort failed to gain significant traction after centrist congressional Democrats said the proposals went too far.
While Democrats tried to harness widespread outrage last year over election reforms that both Georgia and Texas passed after 2020, primary elections in both states this year saw robust levels of turnout that defied Democratic warnings about voter suppression.
But even if the voting rights fight has receded into the background given the focus on economic issues, many states have been quietly adjusting their voting rules ahead of the midterm elections.
Wisconsin
The Wisconsin Supreme Court dealt a blow last week to the Left’s voting agenda by banning two practices championed by Democrats.
One is what Republicans refer to as “ballot harvesting,” or allowing a third party to drop off completed ballots on behalf of a person or people who don’t hand the ballots in themselves.
Voting rights advocates say the practice helps elderly or disabled voters who might struggle to make it to a drop box on their own.
Opponents of the practice say allowing political operatives to drop off ballots in bulk leaves room for fraud that could be better policed by requiring each person to drop off their own ballot.
Voters choosing to use absentee ballots also have the option of mailing them, in addition to leaving them at drop boxes.
Wisconsin’s highest court also significantly curtailed the use of drop boxes.
The court said Wisconsin’s law as written doesn’t allow for voters to return their ballots to unattended drop boxes.
Providing full-time monitoring at drop box sites can be logistically and financially challenging for precincts, which is why many drop boxes are unmanned.
Pennsylvania
Some Republican lawmakers in Pennsylvania have been fighting the state’s vote-by-mail law since the state struggled to count all of its absentee ballots in a timely fashion in 2020.
A Pennsylvania court ruled in January that its state law extending absentee voting to all citizens and cutting the voter registration deadline to just two weeks before Election Day was unconstitutional.
Democratic Gov. Tom Wolf signed into law this week a provision that would require precincts to print, ahead of time, a certain number of ballots based on the number of registered voters in the precinct.
The law was intended to address reports that in previous elections, some polling locations ran out of ballots before all voters had gotten the chance to cast theirs.
Virginia
Virginia Democrats rejected efforts by state Republicans to tighten Virginia’s election laws, including by requiring photo ID to vote and limiting the early voting window.
But Gov. Glenn Youngkin signed a handful of more modest changes into a law that took effect at the beginning of July.
Those included tweaks to how absentee votes are reported and how dead Virginians are removed from the voter registration rolls.
The legislation also pushed back the date by which Virginia must certify its election results, leaving more time for vote-counting and auditing. Results must now be finalized by the first Monday in December; previously, the deadline was the third Monday in November.
New York
Democratic Gov. Kathy Hochul signed into law last month a slate of reforms mirroring the ones that died in Congress last year.
A major tenant of the law would impose “pre-clearance” rules, or rules requiring the state to approve election law changes in jurisdictions deemed to have discriminated previously against marginalized voters, akin to those that were once enforced nationally under the Voting Rights Act.
The Supreme Court has struck down pre-clearance rules.
New York’s new law also expressly prohibits all forms of “voter intimidation” and expands language assistance for voters who speak something other than English.
California
Democratic Gov. Gavin Newsom signed a bill into law in September that permanently enshrined a requirement that the state send a mail-in ballot to every registered California voter regardless of whether they’ve requested one.
That practice was used for the first time in 2020 due to the pandemic.
The new reforms also created a larger buffer around polling places to prevent campaign activity from taking place too close to the ballot box.
That provision aims to tackle the same problem Georgia Republicans attempted to address with one of the most controversial parts of their voting law. In it, Georgia lawmakers prevented all third parties from distributing food or water to voters waiting in line at their polling locations.
The Georgia change was meant to curb what supporters of the law call “line-warming,” or using the pretense of handing out provisions to engage in electioneering that would otherwise be prohibited.
New York’s new voting law is intended to stop the same kind of electioneering from taking place near polling locations where lines have formed.
Arizona
The Justice Department is suing Arizona over its new voting law preventing noncitizens from casting ballots in the state’s elections.
Arizona Republicans successfully passed a bill this spring requiring proof of citizenship for voters who wish to participate in presidential elections in the state of Arizona.
The office of Republican Gov. Doug Ducey claimed when the bill was signed into law that 11,600 Arizona voters who by law are only eligible to vote in federal elections participated in the 2020 election without providing proof of citizenship.
