More than two years after the 2020 presidential election, Republicans in GOP-controlled legislatures are continuing to push totighten voting laws and the rules for election administration,despite the lack of evidence for Donald Trump’s claim that widespread fraud tainted his defeat.
GOP officeholders in North Carolina, Texas, Georgia and other states are pushing for such measures as requiring proof of identification when voting by mail, prohibiting the use of private funds by election administrators and beefing up investigations of alleged election-related wrongdoing.
Proponents say the measures are necessary to restore public faith in election integrity, which declined in the run-up to the 2020 election and has remained low among Republicans in the years since, according to numerous surveys. North Carolina House Speaker Tim Moore (R), who expects to push several such measures this year, including a voter ID law that enjoys broad public support, said the goal is for it to be “easy to vote but hard to cheat.”
Critics counter that most of the measures are aimed at nonexistent threats to election security — and that by promoting them, Republican officials are continuing to signal to the public, without evidence, that election fraud is widespread. They also say that such measures are likely to make it harder for some people to cast ballots.
“The idea is we need to pass these laws to make people feel safer about their elections,” said Sean Morales-Doyle of the nonprofit Brennan Center for Justice. “But what’s really happening is they’re making people believe there’s a huge problem.”
As of late February, state lawmakers had introduced what Brennan identified as 150 restrictive election bills and another 27 election interference bills, meaning laws that would increase the opportunity for partisan involvement in electoral outcomes.
Many of these measures have little chance of passing, either because Republicans don’t hold the legislative majority or because a Democratic governor stands in the way with a veto pen. But a few key proposals have a chance of being approved, including the North Carolina voter ID law that would encompass both in-person and mail voting, a Texas measure to create marshals to investigate election fraud and a proposal in Missouri that would allow citizens to initiate election reviews.
Despite Trump’s insistence that his defeat was marred by fraud, dozens of judges ruled otherwise, and even his own campaign consultants were unable to uncover evidence that he had been cheated of victory.
Perhaps more than any other issue, conservative groups this year are pressing state legislatures to ban private funding of elections. The push began after the 2020 vote, when Trump and his allies seized on the distribution of more than $300 million in grants to election agencies by the Center for Tech and Civic Life (CTCL), a nonpartisan, nonprofit group funded primarily by donations from Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg and his wife, Priscilla Chan.
Defenders of CTCL’s philanthropy say private funding became necessary during the 2020cycle because of the cost of running an election during a pandemic.State and local election officials say additional funding is still needed, and theycriticize public officials who decry private grants yet don’t support increased public funding.