Welcome to the January edition of The Lever — reaching you in a momentous new year. Our democracy is strongest when everyone has a voice.

2024 is off to a busy start, with just six weeks remaining until Super Tuesday. In this time, 19 states will conduct primary elections, allowing voters to express their preferred candidates for President. This month, our Hot Policy Take explores changes in election policy and procedure that will impact voters participating in five key early primary elections.

Later in this email, we examine Florida’s new list maintenance procedures and their consequences for voter registration. We also visit the unfolding lawsuit in Georgia over the security of its electronic voting machines, Curling v. Raffensperger. This case, while filed long before the 2020 election by plaintiffs concerned about voting access, has been co-opted to support conspiracy theories in defense of the Big Lie. Lastly, we share American Oversight’s recent report, The Campaign to Dismantle ERIC, and provide a brief digest of some legislative updates to watch.

HOT POLICY TAKE

Millions of voters will be casting their ballots between today’s first-in-the-nation New Hampshire primary and Super Tuesday. Many of the states holding early primaries have made substantial changes that will impact voter access and the voting process generally since 2020. 

In this month’s Hot Policy Take, we examine how primary voters in the critical early 2024 primary states will encounter substantial changes in election policies and procedures, and the need to support election officials in helping voters navigate these changes.

BY THE NUMBERS

996,676

That’s how many active Florida voter registrations decreased between January 1 and November 30, 2023. This significant change is likely due to new, stricter list maintenance requirements recently enacted by the Florida legislature – some of which may be leading to otherwise-eligible voters being marked as “inactive.”

WHAT WE'RE READING

This week, the case Curling v. Raffensperger goes to trial. Filed long before 2020, this lawsuit, filed by plaintiffs concerned with voting access, alleges that touch-screen electronic voting machines currently used in Georgia are vulnerable to hacking – posing a risk to the potential security of elections. The lawsuit makes no claims that these vulnerabilities have actually been exploited, but that has not stopped political figures from claiming vindication of their claims of conspiracy through the lawsuit.

“I never thought about going to vote due to all the things that were going on [with my health, housing, and jobs]. I felt that no one else was going to help me so I dedicated all my time to getting back to my family and trying to repair all the lost time."

FROM OUR PARTNERS - American Oversight

For more than a decade, the Electronic Registration Information Center (ERIC) was used by both Republican and Democratic-led states as an interstate compact enabling member states to exchange information and improve the accuracy of their voter rolls. At the start of 2023, the program had a membership of more than 30 states and D.C. However, as we explored in our May 2023 Hot Policy Take, ERIC came under politically-motivated scrutiny from state lawmakers and organizations seeking to restrict voter access and undermine trust in our elections. 

A recent report from our partners at American Oversight, The Campaign to Dismantle ERIC, compiles their findings uncovered through litigation and public records requests, painting a broad and detailed picture of the movement to undermine and discredit ERIC as part of a larger project aiming to raise unfounded questions about the security of American democracy.

This compelling read includes examples of source-material showing just how closely conspiracy theorists and discredited election deniers orchestrated elected officials' rapid withdrawal from ERIC.

THE MARKUP

The Markup is VRL’s weekly legislative update for voting rights insiders. If you’d like to get insights straight to your inbox each Monday, head here to sign up.

Here’s a brief update on what we’re watching this week, and a sneak peek into what you can expect from The Markup each week:

Georgia legislators introduce bill to investigate the secretary of state and change voting systems, while a judge upholds cuts to runoff early voting period. A Georgia state senator introduced a bill that would authorize the State Election Board to investigate the secretary of state and remove them as a non-voting member of the Board. A bill introduced in the state House would ban barcodes or QR codes on ballots which are currently scanned and read by vote counting machines – a change Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger testified would be “physically impossible” to implement before the November election. Meanwhile, a federal judge upheld a 2021 law that dramatically shortened the early voting period for runoff elections.

Court in North Carolina enjoins provision that would cause the rejection of some ballots cast by qualified same-day registrants. A federal court issued an order temporarily blocking the state from enforcing a provision of S.B. 747 – which became law over Governor Roy Cooper’s veto in 2023 – that requires a ballot cast by a same-day registrant to be removed if a single confirmation mailing to the voter is returned as undeliverable. The lawsuit alleges that most undeliverable mail is due to post office error rather than a faulty address, that the provision disproportionately disenfranchises demographics that are more likely to experience housing insecurity, and that the cancellation of a voter’s ballot without notice violates due process. Under the court’s order, the state must now develop a process for voters to receive notice and an opportunity to be heard before their ballots are discarded.