Jessica Huseman:
The Heritage Foundation released a “scorecard” this week ranking states on election security. It is, as I’ll explain here, extremely flawed in both its methodology and its conclusions. It has received almost no attention, aside from fawning praise heaped upon it by conservative media. But governors of states that did well — such as Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp — have used it to spin up their credentials, since Heritage is a think tank with significant clout in conservative circles.
“Because Georgia led the way with the passage of the Election Integrity Act, @Heritage has ranked our state NO. 1 on election integrity!” Kemp tweeted the day the scorecard was released. “I’m in the fight to secure our elections – no matter what the woke mob throws our way.”
Heritage’s analysts ranked states in 12 areas, to each of which they assigned seemingly arbitrary point ranges. For example, states can receive up to 20 points for voter ID implementation, but only three points for appropriate vote-counting procedures. Confusingly, states also could receive points for not doing something. If they have never instituted automatic voter registration, for example, they receive points in the “restriction of automatic registration” category. States received point deductions across multiple categories for the same thing. For example, depending on a state’s voter ID law, it may be dinged in both the voter ID category and a category pertaining to citizenship verification.
Ranking states on election integrity is a fraught exercise, because states conduct their elections in significantly different ways. That’s why essentially no reputable organization ranks states in this manner. Instead, states are generally given a letter grade across broad categories rather than being pitted against one another. It is difficult, for example, to do an apples-to-apples comparison of a state like Colorado, which uses mailed ballots almost exclusively and has paper ballots in all cases, to a state like Louisiana, which offers very little vote-by-mail access and uses almost no paper ballots.
And, crucially, the rankings leave out important information. Although this is an “election integrity” scorecard, and the Heritage Foundation has repeatedly made significant noise over the importance of paper ballots and the importance of auditing election results (which you can only do if paper backups are in place), there is no category for those factors. Louisiana — the only state in the country that uses an entirely paperless voting system — is ranked the seventh best state in the country on this list. Texas, which has a handful of counties using DREs, ranks sixth. No category assigns points to states with mandatory audit procedures, which experts agree is among the most clearcut ways to ensure the accuracy of results. California, for example, has stronger technical requirements than federal standards and requires counties to conduct audits after every election. It is ranked 49th.
All of these things help explain why Heritage has arrived at startlingly different conclusions than other organizations that have taken a broad look at election integrity. While, for example, Colorado tends to lead the nation in election security according to organizations like the Center for Strategic and International Studies, American Progress, the Brookings Institution, and others, Heritage has ranked the state 34th. And much of its basis for the rankings of Colorado — and other states — is literally false. For example, the Heritage Foundation claims that Colorado does not check its voter list against lists of deaths or citizenship status. That’s not true, as Colorado is a member of ERIC, which checks for voter registrations of those who have died, and uses information from the Department of Motor Vehicles, which checks citizenship. Also, because Colorado is a vote-by-mail state, it is logically far better at tracking the addresses where ballots must be mailed.
States are also dinged for things that are entirely political in nature and have no relationship to integrity. For example, Heritage penalizes states that have same-day registration, even though there has never been a reputable study linking same-day registration to fraudulent votes. Heritage also penalizes states for counting ballots prior to election day, having automatic voter registration, or allowing private donations to fund election administration—none of which are proven to compromise election security. And while Heritage awards points to states that do not allow third parties to deliver ballots, they do not take into account limitations other states have placed on third-party ballot delivery to prevent untoward ballot harvesting. It is a simple yes or no checkbox, which captures no nuance.
The final list appears to be a simple ranking of who the Heritage Foundation politically prefers. All but two of the top 10 states went for Trump in 2020, and all but one of the top 10 states have Republican chief elections officials. The exception is Wisconsin, whose Board of Elections is controlled by an even split of Republicans and Democrats and whose rules were radically altered several years ago by Republican then-Gov. Scott Walker. Perhaps most tellingly, all 10 of the top 10 states have — and have long had — legislatures controlled by Republicans.