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A Democracy Crisis In The Making: June 2023 Edition

States United Democracy Center, Democracy Foward, Law Forward report – A Democracy Crisis In The Making: June 2023 Edition:

Key Takeaways:

  • 38 states are considering 185 bills that would make it easier to overturn the will of the voters — and harder for trusted election officials to do their jobs.
  • At least eight states have withdrawn from the Electronic Registration Information Center – a bipartisan partnership of state election officials designed to improve the accuracy of states’ voter rolls.
  • There is some good news. Many legislators from both parties, in an array of states, are working to proactively safeguard against election subversion.

In April 2021, we published the first edition of A Democracy Crisis in the Making: How State Legislatures Are Politicizing, Criminalizing, and Interfering with Election Administration. That Report identified a burgeoning trend in state legislatures: bills that would increase the risk of election subversion—that is, that the declared outcome of an election does not reflect the true choice of the voters. Through the 2021 and 2022 state legislative sessions, we tracked nearly 400 legislative proposals that would make election subversion more likely. Fifty-six of them ultimately became law in 26 states. In the two years since our first Report, the danger of election subversion has drawn wider attention. During the 2022 midterm elections, the future of nonpartisan election administration was a campaign issue. Exit polling showed that “democracy” was a top concern for voters. That election came and went without major crises, and the accurate results were ultimately certified on time and in accordance with the law. Moreover, voters in certain states decisively rejected election deniers, whose beliefs were rooted in the baseless conspiracy theory that the 2020 presidential election was stolen from Donald Trump. Some states are moving towards proactively safeguarding against election subversion by advancing legislation to enhance security and privacy protections for election workers or refocusing investigative efforts on improving voter access…”

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