Release:

The States United Democracy Center, Protect Democracy and Law Forward today released an end-of-year update to their Democracy Crisis in the Making series, which analyzes the nationwide election hijacking trend in state legislatures seeking to politicize, criminalize, or interfere with the nonpartisan administration of elections. The December 2o21 update finds that the number of election subversion bills introduced and enacted has continued to grow, even as most state legislatures were out of session by mid-year. As 2021 comes to a close, 262 bills have been introduced in 41 states — an increase of more than 100 bills since we began monitoring this trend in April — with 32 becoming law across 17 states.

The year-end recap also highlights how the nature of the election subversion threat has evolved. Anti-democratic efforts to overturn the will of American voters are not limited to legislation in state legislatures. Looking toward 2022, the December update forecasts that the election subversion threat will have four core pillars:

• Changing the rules to tilt the playing field, roll back the freedom to vote, and hijack election administration;
• Changing the people who defend our democracy by sidelining, replacing, or attacking professional election officials and replacing them with hyper-partisan actors;
• Promoting controversial constitutional theories about our elections to justify partisan takeovers; and
• Eroding public confidence and trust in our election system.

The update includes key examples from states like Pennsylvania, where there is a proposed constitutional amendment that would allow the state legislature “to unilaterally scuttle any election regulations issued by the state’s chief elections officer …  and would also create a permanent audit system subject to the legislature’s rules.” In Wisconsin, state legislators have introduced a measure that would allow for the imprisonment of “members of the Elections Commission or its staff if they willfully neglect to engage in a particular version of voter registration list maintenance.” And in Michigan, local Republicans have appointed election deniers to canvassing boards in eight of the eleven largest counties in the state…