Voters face a confusing landscape of expanded access in some states and tighter restrictions in others.
What will voting look like this fall?
In some places, it’s already underway. Alabama officials began mailing ballots to absentee voters last week, and five states will start in-person early voting this month. During the Covid pandemic, many states expanded such options, and since the 2020 election 36 of them have passed laws aiming to increase voting access through measures such as mail-in ballots, drop boxes, and fast-track voter registration. At the same time, 27 states, including Texas, Georgia, Florida, and Iowa, have added restrictions. These include introducing or tightening voter-ID requirements, criminalizing third-party assistance at the polls, and shortening the window for early voting. Many states are also purging names from voting rolls. Republican lawmakers and conservative activists argue that such policies are commonsense measures needed to prevent voter fraud, a necessary corrective after the looser rules of the 2020 election cycle. But many election experts fear they will instead suppress turnout. “There’s a significant likelihood that people will be wrongly disenfranchised,” said Andrew Garber of the Brennan Center for Justice.
How did the pandemic change voting?
Social distancing guidelines led states to expand their menu of voting options in 2020. Most states treated the fear of Covid as a valid excuse to vote absentee, and 10 mailed ballots to all registered voters. Most states also arranged for early, in-person voting, and for the first time in American history, a majority of voters cast ballots before Election Day. The result was turnout of 67 percent, the highest in the 21st century. But after Donald Trump lost the election, he tried to overturn the result, including by spreading baseless claims of widespread voter fraud. Republican voters’ confidence in the reliability of presidential elections plummeted from 75 percent in 2020 to 47 percent in 2024. GOP state lawmakers then made “election integrity” central to their agenda—even though illegal voting is vanishingly rare. In 2020, for example, there were just four documented cases of voter fraud in Arizona out of more than 6 million votes cast. In Georgia, a focus of Trump’s “Stop the Steal” efforts, there were none.
What has happened since 2020?
Some pandemic-era accessibility measures became permanent, but many more were rolled back. Texas banned drive-through voting and 24-hour polling places, while Georgia banned distributing water near polling sites. A half-dozen states have even cracked down on voter registration drives. Since the 2023 passage of a Florida bill imposing a $250,000 fine for breaching limits on how organizers can return forms, statewide registrations through voter drives have fallen 95 percent. Under a 2021 Texas law, “if you say the wrong thing to a voter when you knock on the door, you’ve committed a crime, a serious crime,” said Gary Bledsoe of the Texas NAACP. “It’s meant to intimidate people.” And now, voters are being kicked off rolls.
How many are being removed?
Tens of thousands. Right-wing activists have launched a massive campaign to challenge the validity of voter registrations. One such challenge led to the improper removal of 1,000 voters in Waterford, Mich., last year, while North Carolina Republicans have filed a lawsuit to remove 225,000 people from the rolls. True the Vote, a source of debunked voter fraud claims in the discredited film 2000 Mules, has launched an app allowing users to report names, and 7,000 people have already made nearly half a million challenges. Election officials have also been intimidated. In a May survey, 38 percent of election officials reported experiencing threats or harassment, while 11 percent said they were seriously considering quitting. Guns are allowed at polling sites in 37 states, and in 2022, voters in Maricopa County, Arizona, encountered armed vigilantes near drop boxes. The resulting climate of fear has contributed to a shortage of polling sites—around 100,000 fewer than in 2018—partly because many school districts now refuse to host voting in schools.
What about the counting of votes?
States have also changed their laws around the certification of their electoral votes. Georgia, for example, instituted vague new rules that allow county boards to conduct their own inquiries into their elections, which could delay certification of local election returns past state and federal deadlines. These rules also appear to allow local officials to throw out votes at their own discretion. “Election deniers have infiltrated local county election boards,” said Fred Wertheimer of the election integrity group Democracy 21. “Those local boards certify their results to the state, and then the state board certifies the state results. There is room for real mischief at the local level.”
What could result from these changes?
In the worst-case scenario, votes legally cast could be ignored. After the 2020 election, the votes were certified, and then several states filed lawsuits to overturn the count. They lost. This time, some states have laid the groundwork to refuse to certify the results at all. If enough states’ electoral votes are thrown into doubt, neither candidate will reach the 270 votes to be declared the winner. In such a scenario, the election would be thrown to the House of Representatives, where each state’s incoming congressional delegation would get a single vote. That’s something that hasn’t happened since John Quincy Adams was elected in 1825. “What if the votes aren’t counted?” said Ari Berman, voting rights correspondent for Mother Jones. “What’s a court going to do then? Then you might have disputes that look like Bush v. Gore.”
The lie of noncitizen voters
Of the hundreds of millions of votes cast since the 1980s, fewer than 70 have been found to come from noncitizens. Yet Trump insists that “millions” of votes by undocumented immigrants cost him the popular vote in 2016, and has said falsely that the Biden administration is now “allowing these people to come in—people that don’t speak our language—they are signing them up to vote.” In response to this nonexistent problem, Republican lawmakers have pushed more than 50 bills in 27 states requiring affirmative proof of citizenship from voters. In Texas, Attorney General Ken Paxton sent armed officers to raid the homes of Latino voting activists, claiming they were registering noncitizens to vote. This is MAGA’s “newest version of the Big Lie,” said Berman. “They are fusing voter fraud paranoia with anti-immigrant hysteria.”
