Release of an important report:

Today, Protect Democracy released a new report titled, Democracy Crisis in the Making: How State Legislatures are Politicizing, Criminalizing, and Interfering with Elections, written with Law Forward and the States United Democracy Center. The report describes an under-reported trend: Across the country, state legislators are proposing bills that would give partisan state legislators greater control over elections while hamstringing experienced state and local election administrators who have traditionally run our voting systems.

As of April 6, at least 148 such bills have been introduced in 36 states. Many of the bills would make elections more difficult to administer or even unworkable; make it more difficult to finalize election results; allow for election interference and manipulation by hyper-partisan actors; and, in the worst cases, allow state legislatures to overturn the will of the voters and precipitate a democracy crisis. If these bills had been in place in 2020, they would have significantly added to the turmoil of the post-election period, and raised the prospect that the outcome of the election would have been contrary to the popular vote.