The Texas law is likely the culmination of the large-scale Republican push to restrict voting access this spring and summer — the policy byproduct of former President Donald Trump’s unfounded claims that the 2020 election was fraudulent. At this point in the year, most state legislatures are now out of session, so we are close to being able to close the book on our tracking of these restrictions for 2021. Based on data from the Brennan Center for Justice and the Voting Rights Lab as well as our own research, we now count 52 new voting restrictions that have been enacted this year in 21 different states. And 41 of the 52 were sponsored primarily or entirely by Republicans.
In total, state legislators proposed a whopping 581 voting-restriction bills this year — 89 percent of them sponsored by Republicans. Most (402) were rejected or failed to pass before a key deadline, but 42 of those passed at least one state-legislative chamber before dying, and another eight would have become law had they not been vetoed by their state’s (usually Democratic) governor.1 And technically, 127 voting-restriction bills are still alive, including 20 that have passed at least one chamber. However, these bills are mostly either blocked by Democratic governors or languishing in committee (putting them still quite far away from passage). So the number of voting restrictions enacted here in 2021 likely won’t rise very far, if at all, beyond 52.
Even if nothing else passes, though, that is still a staggering number by historical standards. The Brennan Center for Justice has tracked the number of new voting restrictions enacted every year since 2011, and no year has even come close to 2021: The previous high was the 19 voting restrictions enacted in 2011,2 the year after Republicans took full control of several state governments in the 2010 election. In recent years, the number of new restrictions has typically been in the single digits. (For example, 2020 saw only seven new voting restrictions become law.)
The sheer number of bills — both enacted and proposed — really emphasizes what a big priority tightening election laws has become for the GOP since the 2020 election. But it’s also important to remember that a single law can contain numerous far-reaching voting restrictions. And as such, Texas’s Senate Bill 1 is probably the most comprehensive voting-restriction law passed since Florida’s SB 90.