Welcome to the January edition of The Lever, the first of 2022. In this month’s Hot Policy Take, we take a deep dive into the 2,842 elections-related bills we tracked in 2021. Some of our insights might surprise you.
We also have an exciting update about the State Voting Rights Tracker that we hope you will explore. Finally, we share some important news and helpful resources regarding Texas’s upcoming primary elections, the first to take place under its new omnibus voter suppression bill. Let’s get right to it.
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In our upcoming report on the 2021 legislative session, we’ll be going issue-by-issue to show where election laws shifted last year. Although much attention has been paid to the many bills that restrict voter access or impede election administration, the majority of bills passed at the state level in 2021 actually improve voter access or election administration.
The Voting Rights Lab tracked 2,842 elections-related bills in the 2021 legislative session. 295 of those bills are now law in a total of 46 states and the District of Columbia. Of those bills enacted, 116 improve voter access or election administration, 47 restrict voter access or election administration, 29 are neutral, and 103 are mixed or unclear. Get a preview of our issue-by-issue analysis in this month’s Hot Policy Take.
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BY THE NUMBERS
1,731 Bills
We’re less than a month into 2022, and our team of policy experts is already following 1,731 bills through our State Voting Rights Tracker. These include 2022 prefiled bills as well as carryover bills from last year. You can now toggle between legislative sessions in the tool’s Comprehensive Bill Search.
Our team will continue to categorize and summarize new bills for the 2022 session, so head over to the Tracker for the latest updates.
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WHAT WE'RE READING
Check out The Houston Chronicle's recent coverage of spiking mail ballot rejection rates across Texas. With as many as 50% of ballot applications in Bexar County (San Antonio) being rejected, the issue appears to stem primarily from confusion around the implementation of S.B. 1, the restrictive voting law the state passed in 2021.
“With less than a month left for voters to request mail ballots ahead of the Feb. 18 deadline for the March 1 primaries, mail ballot applications are being rejected by the hundreds, voters are confused about what information to include with their applications, and counties have not yet received training on how to use the online system to fix them. The state will hold its first webinar on the ballot tracker site Thursday.”
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FROM OUR PARTNERS
With early primaries just over a month away, Texas is already seeing the consequences of its restrictive omnibus voting bill, S.B. 1, which has led to widespread voter confusion and frustration.
Our friends at the League of Women Voters of Texas put together this excellent resource to help voters navigate the changes to vote-by-mail in Texas. If you live in Texas or know someone who does, please share this valuable resource with them.
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THE MARKUP
The Markup is VRL’s weekly legislative update for voting rights insiders. Here’s a snippet from yesterday’s edition – a sample of what you can expect each week:
Arizona moves on legislation that restricts voter access and interferes with election administration. Arizona’s Senate Committee on Government is scheduled to hear election subversion legislation today, including bills that mandate a poorly-defined review of voter registration lists, targeting specific voters and conducted by a person appointed by the legislature, and an “audit” of election equipment by third parties. These bills risk striking eligible voters from the registration list and threaten unnecessary decertification of election equipment requiring costly replacements.
On Friday, the Arizona House introduced omnibus legislation that is about as extreme a piece of legislation as we have seen: H.B. 2596 would eliminate early voting and no-excuse mail voting, require all ballot counting be done exclusively by hand, and allow for partisan legislature-run reviews of elections. Most alarmingly, it would allow the legislature to simply reject the results of an election and allow any elector to request a new election be held.
If you’d like to get insights like this straight to your inbox each Monday, head here to sign up.
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