As Americans, we have the freedom and duty to vote. We also have a duty to ensure that every vote is counted, and as CLC’s president and founder Trevor Potter pointed out on Election Day, that requires patience while election workers count every ballot and double check their work. While it would be nice to know the election results by the time we go to bed at night, we usually don’t have a final result for a few states on election night.
That’s not a sign something is wrong, it’s a sign our democracy is working.
Election Day is in the rearview mirror, but there were quite a few developments and opportunities that shaped outcomes of this year’s election cycle:
Vote-by-mail has improved voter participation while also ensuring elections are safe and secure. Many states took steps to expand access to vote-by-mail during the 2020 election, which led to 43% of voters casting their ballot by mail that year. Unfortunately, some states have taken steps to restrict access to vote-by-mail since then.
A victory in our lawsuit representing the League of Women Voters of Missouri (LWVMO) and Missouri State Conference of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (Missouri NAACP) meant that our clients could do critical voter engagement work without fear of criminal prosecution. Anti-voter laws, like the one we challenged in Missouri, do not make elections safer.
Data from the U.S. Election Assistance Commission (EAC)’s survey of the 2020 election offered important insights on voter participation. The bad news: voter purges and error-prone signature matching policies are disenfranchising voters (sometimes without their knowledge). The good news: we can close those gaps for future elections.
Access to voting has always been uneven, since the founding of our democracy. That's why this season we're decoding the freedom to vote. Catch new episodes of our award-winning podcast on Tuesdays.
Democracy Decoded is part of The Democracy Group, a network of podcasts that examines what's broken in our democracy and how we can work together to fix it.
Campaign Legal Center is advancing democracy through law.
The nonpartisan Campaign Legal Center is dedicated to advancing democracy through law at the federal, state and local levels, fighting for every American’s rights to responsive government and a fair opportunity to participate in and affect the democratic process.
