Breaking down how state voting laws have changed since 2020

With regard to battleground states like Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin, Arizona, and Georgia, how have voting laws changed or remained the same since 2020?

The story in Pennsylvania is the lack of change. We have divided government here, where the Democrats narrowly control the state House, Republicans control the state Senate, and there is a Democratic governor. There’s a lot of needed reforms, but the two parties just can’t get onboard to come up with a compromise bill that would put those reforms into place. For example, we can’t process mail ballots here until Election Day, meaning that the counts on election night may take a little more time to come out in Pennsylvania.

Michigan’s an interesting one because it has had unified Democratic governance, so they were able to implement early in-person voting, another reform that I think would be great to have here in Pennsylvania.

On the flip side, you see some additional requirements going into place in some of the other battleground states. In Georgia they’ve had a unified Republican government and in North Carolina enough Republican control of the state legislature to override a Democratic governor, so they’ve put into place additional regulations on mail ballot voting. In North Carolina they enacted a stricter voter ID law, too.

What role did disinformation about the integrity of the 2020 election play in state legislatures changing voting laws?

You can see in the debates over some of these new laws the effect of the ‘Big Lie,’ where Donald Trump and his supporters accused election officials of doing all these nefarious things with mail ballots. That was clearly still top-of-mind for many legislators when they were thinking about policy reforms coming out of 2020, and this will be the first presidential election where those go into force.

In a positive way, though, you didn’t see some of the worst ideas take hold. There were proposals made in Georgia to end the policy in which anyone could request a mail ballot, for example, and that didn’t end up going through. While there have been several reforms put into place across states that increase documentation requirements for absentee voting, I can’t think of a single state that placed substantial additional restrictions on who can request mail ballots.

What about the impact of the COVID pandemic? How did that shape changes to voting laws in different states, whether that meant expanding or restricting voting?

A number of states, especially those that had elections happening in spring 2020, really had to expand their capacity to support mail balloting because a lot of people wanted to vote by mail in those elections. You do see some lingering effects of that as many of those states remain more capable to support mail voting than they were before 2020.

We’re not going to see anywhere near the rate of mail balloting that we saw in 2020, but we will see more people using mail ballots than used them in, say, 2016. Part of that is these states that expanded their capacity to support mail balloting, but also there are a number of states that have continued to move toward all mail ballot elections. Oregon and Washington have been doing this for some time now, but, especially out in the western United States, we’re seeing more and more states send people mail ballots as the default and Election Day voting is the unusual thing.

How have courts struck down different laws? What has already been resolved, and what’s still in the courts now in different states?

The one that I’m aware of that’s potentially looming before the U.S. Supreme Court is Arizona’s proof-of-citizenship law to get registered. States have a lot of leeway about what requirements they might put in place to verify the identity of people who want to register to vote, but there’s also something called the federal voter registration form that states are mandated to accept under the National Voter Registration Act. Currently, Arizona has to accept the national voter registration form even if it doesn’t contain all the details that it wants to document someone’s citizenship status. There’s an appeal before the U.S. Supreme Court that will probably have to be decided on before the election.

Another one that’s top of mind for me is a lawsuit working through the Pennsylvania court system about the dates on the signatures next to the affidavits on the mail ballots, and there might be some court action on that still before the election.

In 2020, there was a plethora of court cases that the U.S. Supreme Court was ruling on into October. I think—thankfully—that’s not where it appears we’re at right now. There’s lots of lawsuits happening, but I don’t expect the U.S. Supreme Court will be weighing in on multiple cases even after mail ballots have gone out.

In the context of laws making it harder or easier to vote, how much of an impact do these kinds of laws have on voter turnout, compared to other factors?

On the margin, all these things matter, and they can really have big impacts on individual registrants’ ability to vote or potentially people’s ability to get registered in the first place. In the end, that’s going to have some impact on voter turnout.

I think there’s this view that voter restrictions only affect Democrats, so that when people are disenfranchised by these laws, that’s going to necessarily move the needle in the Republican direction. More often than not, these laws have a broader impact than people first realize. So, it might bring down overall turnout a little bit, but, in terms of the margin of the election, it may not have a huge effect because it’s having an equal effect on people who vote for Democrats and people who vote for Republicans.

What are you researching now, and what else are you focused on or watching ahead of the 2024 election?

My own research is largely on the types of things that we’re talking about, be it how mail-ballot processes work or how voter-ID laws may or may not affect election outcomes. As I referenced earlier, this is the first presidential election that is being conducted since many new election administration policies were enacted following the 2020 election. After the election, I’ll be going back and evaluating a bunch of these policies to see whether they had the effects that we expected. Is there evidence that turnout was affected? If so, can we detect any electoral consequences? Because we have so many new policies in place, there’s so much opportunity to do evaluation coming out of this election.