Republicans push for stricter election laws, despite scant proof of fraud

More than two years after the 2020 presidential election, Republicans in GOP-controlled legislatures are continuing to push to tighten 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.

In particular, 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 2020 cycle because of the cost of running an election during a pandemic. State and local election officials say additional funding is still needed, and they criticize public officials who decry private grants yet don’t support increased public funding.

“We hear from local election administrators every day about how important resources are, and that call for support has only gotten louder after Congress slashed funding for state and local election departments from $400 million to $75 million during the last budget,” said Tiana Epps-Johnson, CTCL’s executive director.

CTCL, which has a bipartisan board, distributed grants in 2020 to nearly 2,500 U.S. election departments spanning 47 states, according to the organization. Over half of all grants nationwide went to election departments, many in rural areas, that serve fewer than 25,000 registered voters. The most common uses for the assistance were to pay temporary staff members and poll workers, buy protective gear related to the pandemic and fund absentee voting, according to CTCL.

Critics have claimed that CTCL is an organization with deep ties to the Democratic Party, and that the funds were funneled disproportionately to Democratic counties and used to “influence” local election policy and administration.

“It was supposed to be spent on masks and gloves and things like that,” Jason Snead, the head of the Honest Elections Project, a conservative nonprofit that advocates tighter controls on election security, told a recent gathering of Republican state attorneys general. “Now, of course, we know that is not the case. It was actually spent on get-out-the-vote operations, driving mail voting.”

That view, which CTCL and many local election officials say is untrue, prompted 24 states to enact bans on private funding over the past two years. Snead said his focus is on persuading other states to follow suit and on his concern that some communities in states with bans have continued to receive private funds.

North Carolina Republicans tried to enact a ban in 2021, but Gov. Roy Cooper (D) vetoed it. This year, the legislature has stronger GOP majorities in both chambers — veto-proof in the Senate and just one vote shy in the House — and is expected to try again.

“We have a number of centrist Democrats who are voting with us on a regular basis and I would expect would vote with us on this as well,” said Moore, the House speaker.

Georgia, which passed a ban in 2021, approved another bill this year that will address what some conservatives say is the continued practice in some communities of accepting private funds via loopholes in the law. The new measure will actually restore the legality of receiving private funds but will require such grants to be directed to the state electoral board to ensure that they are equitably distributed among Republican and Democratic counties.

North Carolina Republicans also plan to enact another voter ID law following years of litigation over previous iterations. One earlier law was struck down last year by a Democratic-majority state Supreme Court. But a new GOP-majority court was seated in January and agreed to rehear the case. Observers expect the court to overturn the prior ruling that the law was racially discriminatory. Meanwhile, the new legislation would apply not only to in-person voting but also mail voting.

“That, to me, is such a baseline protection,” Moore said of voter ID requirements. “We should absolutely do it. Thirty-six states have some form of voter ID law in place. It is absolutely critical to do that because what it does is it gives assurance to the public. ”

Voting rights advocates have opposed North Carolina’s attempts to enact voter ID requirements, arguing that such rules would disproportionately affect lower-income and minority populations.

Texas, Arkansas and Missouri are among the states where proposals to beef up investigations into election fraud are under consideration.

Florida last year created an Office of Election Crimes and Security, mirroring efforts in other GOP-led states to focus prosecutors’ energy on electoral crimes.

But after Gov. Ron DeSantis (R) staged a news conference to announce the arrests of 20 previously incarcerated people who had supposedly voted illegally, a number of the charges were later dropped. In other states, too, investigators hunting for voter fraud have found few actual cases.

As more states create election integrity units, Arizona is a cautionary tale

And even as Republicans lawmakers insist they want to stamp out voter fraud, a number of them are making choices that critics contend could make it harder to detect.

The Electronic Registration Information Center (ERIC) is a multistate consortium that crunches and shares data from member states to help them remove ineligible voters, such as those who have died or moved away. But seven GOP-led states have withdrawn since January 2022, often citing misinformation about the program that has been spread by election deniers. Other Republican-dominated states, including Texas, could soon follow.

Proponents of the consortium say the departures weaken one of the best tools available for detecting attempts to illegally vote in multiple states.

This year’s push for election-related legislation follows two years of intense activity on this front, during which a number of Republican-led states, notably Georgia, Texas and Florida, passed sweeping election laws in the name of improving security at the ballot box.

Georgia became in 2021 one of the first states to ban private funding of elections while also imposing new identification requirements for those casting ballots by mail, curtailing the use of drop boxes for absentee ballots, making it a crime for third-party groups to hand out food or water to voters standing in line and making it easier to challenge a voter’s eligibility.

Texas followed soon after with a bill that imposed new identification requirements for voters casting ballots by mail — a requirement that resulted in thousands of ballots being rejected in 2022. The law required voters to include either their driver’s license or Social Security number on their mail ballot, but not all voter registration records include both those numbers, so many registered voters’ ballots were not counted.

Among the proposals with less chance of passing this year is a bill in Arizona that would require all ballots to be hand-counted within 24 hours of an election — a physical and technical impossibility, by the account of many experts. In Virginia, draft legislation that would have allowed a panel of citizens to void an election result following a post-election “forensic” audit never made it out of committee.

In the meantime, Democrats are also pushing election-related legislation in states they dominate. New Mexico’s Democratic-controlled legislature recently approved measures stiffening penalties against those who threaten election workers and expanding automatic voter registration in the state. Michigan Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson (D) is pushing to criminalize the spread of election misinformation, though she has acknowledged that restricting political speech could come up against First Amendment protections.

One proposal in Arizona, where Republicans narrowly control the state House and Senate but a Democrat serves as governor, has drawn bipartisan support, including from Democratic Secretary of State Adrian Fontes.

The legislation, which is expected to come up for a vote this month, would make digital images of ballots public. It would also allow public access to lists of eligible voters before elections, lists of everyone who voted after elections, images of ballots and sortable tabulation spreadsheets known as cast vote records. Combined, supporters said, the information would allow citizens to analyze for themselves the accuracy of vote tallies from machines.

“The intent is to make elections transparent, trackable and publicly verified so that winners know they won, and more importantly, losers know they lost,” said state Sen. Ken Bennett (R), a former Arizona secretary of state.

Voting rights advocates oppose the idea, saying it could lead to voter intimidation and the spread of misinformation.

“We believe that releasing this information while we’re in a live election increases the likelihood of more disinformation and is irresponsible,” said Alex Gulotta, Arizona state director for All Voting is Local Action.

Emily Guskin in Washington and Patrick Marley in Madison, Wis., contributed to this report.