When Oakland County Clerk Lisa Brown looks back on the nine days of early voting she administered in the lead-up to Michigan’s Nov. 7 local elections, she considers it not only a logistical success, but a good time for those working the polls.

The people who came out to cast ballots were especially pleasant, she recalls, and election workers got to run the polls without the pressure of long and crowded Election Days. 

The southeast Michigan county was one of ten throughout the state where some voters tried out in-person early voting this fall, a first in this state. The innovation was one of the key provisions of Proposal 2, a constitutional amendment that voters overwhelmingly approved last year that contained many other changes aimed at protecting and expanding ballot access, including mandating ballot drop boxes and funding postage for mail-in ballots.

With the entire state set to adopt in-person early voting in 2024, Brown and some other clerks took advantage of the lower-turnout races this year to try out early voting as a pilot program. 

“We’re glad to be that resource for others,” Brown said. “It will make it easier for other clerks next year that we can share our experience, advice and knowledge.”

In addition to adopting Prop 2 last year, Michigan voters delivered the state House and Senate to Democrats, and reelected Democratic Governor Gretchen Whitmer, giving the party its first trifecta control of the state government in 38 years. This came after several years of Republican legislators—many of them motivated by Trumpian voter fraud conspiracies—pushing for new voting restrictions, while others in the GOP played with overturning elections and ran for office on proposals to unwind the election system.

The newly-empowered Democrats, by contrast, made democracy legislation a priority. Powered by what voting access advocates are calling a “pro-voter” majority in the House and Senate, the legislature has passed a raft of new legislation that’s meant to make it easier for people to register and cast ballots, to shore up election systems, and to protect election workers.

“There was a call to action with the passage of Proposal 2,” said Democratic Representative Penelope Tsernoglou, who was elected to the House as part of this blue wave in 2022. “It was clear that people in Michigan wanted more voter access and wanted to support whatever we could do to…make voting easy, accessible, streamlined.” 

But key pieces of this agenda were left unfinished—including a state-level Voting Rights Act and a bill to end prison gerrymandering—and Democrats’ window of action to push them through may be closing just as quickly as it opened. The party finds itself in a very tight spot if they hope to pass more of it by next fall’s elections, when they risk losing control of the legislature.

The Michigan legislature adjourned for the year on Nov. 14, about a month earlier than usual, and when it returns Democrats will have lost their ability to pass legislation through the state House, likely through the middle of 2024. That’s because two Democrats are resigning from the House after winning mayoral races on Nov. 7, leaving the chamber evenly split between Democrats and Republicans until their blue districts hold special elections next year.

This puts pressure on 2024, a year that won’t just be a deadline for Michigan Democrats to complete their voting rights agenda, but also the first proving ground for some of their new elections measures, all against the backdrop of possible renewed efforts by Donald Trump to test the democratic system.

Kim Murphy-Kovalick, programs director of Voters Not Politicians, a group that organized to get Prop 2 on the ballot in 2022 and lobbied Lansing on voting rights this year, is glad to see so much legislation pass but acknowledges that there’s still much work to be done. 

“We have a pro-voter legislature but our majorities are very slim, and there are still elected officials who do not support these measures,” she told Bolts. “So while Michigan has made great gains in the last few years, we’re in a tenuous place.”

With the legislature set to adjourn earlier than expected this month, Michigan legislators worked right up to the end to pass a flurry of bills with the intended effect of reducing friction at nearly all points in the voting process, starting from registration. 

Michigan adopted automatic voter registration, a system in which the government uses existing points of interactions with residents to proactively register them, back in 2018, thanks to a different ballot proposition. But lawmakers on Nov. 8 passed a bill sponsored by Tsernoglou that would expand the state agencies tasked with automatically registering someone to vote. In addition to signing people up when they get or update a driver’s license, the state would also register them through interactions with Native American tribal nations, Medicaid applications (though this provision is contingent on a federal blessing) and the Department of Corrections. 

As Bolts reported last week, this is the first law in the nation under which people leaving prison would be automatically registered to vote. 

Lawmakers also passed a bill that would allow 16 and 17-year-olds to preregister, so that they’re already on the rolls to cast votes once they become eligible at 18. Proponents of this reform, which already exists in some form in 25 other states, say that it helps build civic habits early, and encourages turnout among young voters. Both of these voter registration bills now await Whitmer’s signature. (Editor’s note: Whitmer signed both bills into law on Nov. 30.)

Whitmer signed another bill this month that repealed the state’s ban on paid rides to the polls. This unusual restriction, defended by the GOP, threatened outside groups with criminal charges if they paid to transport people to the polls, limiting get-out-the-vote methods used elsewhere.

Another law that she signed would change the rules for ballot challenges so that votes cast by people who register on the day of the election are no longer automatically entered in “challenged” status, which delays ballot processing. Tsernoglou says this rule benefits voters in college towns like Ann Arbor and East Lansing, where many students use same-day voter registration. 

HB 4570, meanwhile, will allow voters to request absentee ballot applications online, codifying and make permanent a process that Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson has already put in place.

Still other legislation passed during this final sprint focused on protecting against false information on the campaign trail, and protecting voting procedures and election workers. One set of bills, also sponsored by Tsernoglou, would require disclaimers on campaign ads produced with AI technology, in an attempt to combat “deepfakes,” digitally-manipulated content that’s increasingly being used to spread political disinformation.

Other reforms would clarify that only the state supreme court may contest the results of a presidential election, and establish a process candidates must follow to petition for judicial review; lawmakers passed those bills to deter frivolous lawsuits of the sort that Trump’s campaign filed in Michigan in the aftermath of the 2020 election. All of these measures also await Whitmer’s signature. 

Lawmakers also passed a bill, now on Whitmer’s desk, that would make harassing or intimidating an election worker a crime, up to a felony. (Editor’s note: Whitmer signed this bill and the ones mentioned in the prior paragraph on Nov. 30.) With it, Michigan would join a growing list of states passing laws that have created new criminal charges for people who harass election workers since the 2020 election and its aftermath, which has seen election workers nationwide complain of threats they’ve received.

Where these laws have been proposed, though, some criminal justice reform advocates have raised concerns about the strategy of creating new criminal charges, objecting to measures that increase the footprint of the prison system and pointing out that such measures may needlessly pile onto existing anti-harassment laws. 

Earlier this year, Michigan Democrats already adopted another package of landmark reforms meant to implement and fund provisions of Prop 2: These measures established the modalities of early voting, detailed municipality drop box requirements, and codified a system for online absentee ballot tracking. It also allowed voters to sign up on a list to receive mail ballots every cycle, without having to ask for them again.

Whitmer signed this package into law in July. 

Brown, the Oakland County clerk, sees the changes brought about by Prop 2 as sorely needed. “From a voting rights perspective, I’d say we finally caught up to a lot of other states,” she said. “We were lacking and lagging for way too long.”

Brown served two terms as a Democrat in the state House from 2009 to 2012, when the legislature was either split or under Republican control. She recalls how difficult it was then to pass voting rights legislation. 

“You couldn’t get some of these issues through,” Brown told Bolts. “It took citizens to get together and say, ‘If the legislature can’t do this, we’re gonna do it.’ And that’s how we got those ballot proposals. So I think we made a lot of really good progress.”

When Democrats took control of Lansing last year for the first time since the 1980s, they were meant to have a two-year stint in power. But their narrow 56-54 majority in the state House has been thrown into question: Representatives Kevin Coleman and Lori Stone decided to run for mayor in their respective hometowns of Westland and Warren, and they’ll now leave their office early since they prevailed in those mayoral elections on Nov. 7.

Democrats feel confident they’ll eventually regain a working majority once Coleman and Stone’s seats are filled, since both come from solidly-blue districts. But these special elections may take a while to organize. 

Speaker Joe Tate doused some Democrats’ hope that the specials would happen in February to coincide with the state’s presidential primary, telling Bridge Michigan that he doesn’t “see that as feasible.” Bridge Michigan reports that special elections may be held in May, or even as late as August to coincide with another statewide primary. The final decision lies with Whitmer. (Update on Nov. 27: Whitmer has scheduled primaries for both seats on Jan. 30, with general elections to follow on April 16.)

In the meantime, there may be five to eight months in which Michigan has a Senate under Democratic control, but a House divided 54-54 between Democrats and Republicans—a situation that some observers are already calling a recipe for partisan gridlock. 

Advocates in the state are nervous that, by the time the specials are held, especially if they’re in August, lawmakers’ attention will have shifted to running for reelection in the November races. 

And there’s a lot else that they were asking of lawmakers. Murphy-Kovalick of Voters Not Politicians was hoping they’d pass a bill banning people from carrying guns within 100 feet of polling locations and county boards. 

“It’s very disappointing that banning weapons at polling locations didn’t make it across the finish line,” Murphy-Kovalick said, “because open carry of weapons at polling locations is a voter intimidation tactic that has been used in the past, and we would like to avoid that next year.” The bill passed the House but did not make it out of the Senate this year. 

Another reform that stalled this year was a proposed Michigan Voting Rights Act, intended to prevent racial discrimination in voting. At least six states have passed such measures in recent years in order to fill in voter protection gaps that have been left by the recent court decisions that weakened the federal Voting Rights Act, explains Aseem Mulji, legal counsel at the Campaign Legal Center, a national organization that advocates for voting rights and endorsed the Michigan proposal. 

“There is a common-sense response to the erosion of voting rights at the federal level; states have the power to pass their own VRAs,” he said. “You don’t have to just rely on the federal law. It’s sort of baffling that the idea has just begun to catch on.”

Michigan’s proposed VRA, which didn’t pass either chamber this year, is designed to do just this. One provision would require local governments to get preclearance from the secretary of state or from a state court before making certain voting changes, which would mirror a key section of the federal VRA that was gutted by the U.S. Supreme Court in 2013. The package also includes provisions to protect Michigan’s minority groups; for example requiring voting materials to be translated into Arabic and other languages from the Middle East and North Africa, in service of the many people from those regions living in the state. 

“It’s worth acknowledging that the state’s taken really tremendous strides towards improving access and freedom to vote,” said Mulji. “And this is really a way to protect the progress the state has made against future backsliding, by saying, ‘we won’t allow you to backslide on any protections to the extent that they result in racial discrimination.’” 

Another missed opportunity to shore up voting equity was a bill to end prison gerrymandering. In Michigan, as in most states, people incarcerated in state prisons don’t have the right to vote but, for the purposes of drawing electoral districts, are counted as part of the population where the prison is located rather than where their last address before being incarcerated. This inflates the political power of small, rural areas where prisons tend to be located at the expense of more urban and more diverse areas that tend to suffer a heavier incarceration rate.

The Michigan Senate first took up the issue in September with a hearing in the Ethics and Elections Committee, but the legislation did not advance. For now, Michigan won’t join the other 11 states including Colorado and Virginia that have ended prison gerrymandering. 

Murphy-Kovalick doesn’t expect the VRA package or the prison gerrymandering bill to pass a tied House next year. But Tsernoglou doesn’t necessarily think that the next few months will be time lost. 

“We really need to have some time to do our work in our offices of getting bills drafted and introduced,” she said. “I think this is absolutely fine for us to have this time right now and it’s also a really great opportunity for us to figure out what we can do on a bipartisan basis.” 

She acknowledges that it’s been hard to generate bipartisan consensus on election legislation but thinks it’s still possible. 

Whatever happens with the rest of Democrats’ agenda Michigan voters will go into 2024 with stronger protections and easier access to the ballot than they’ve had in past years, and other states are already eying Lansing as a blueprint on how to strengthen democracy. But Murphy-Kovalick also warns that next year could be Democrats’ last opportunity for a while to build on their recent work.

“There are some other things that, if we end up losing a pro-voter majority moving forward, might not ever see the light of day,” said Murphy-Kovalick. “So we’re hoping to get some of these across the finish line next year to make sure that everything is in place to protect our elections, not only in 2024, but moving beyond that.” 

The post Michigan Democrats Sprint Through ‘Pro-Voter’ Agenda to Close Out 2023 appeared first on Bolts.

Nobody told Percy Glover he could vote when he was released from prison nineteen years ago. Michigan allows anyone who is not presently incarcerated to vote, meaning Glover could have immediately registered, but he spent years unaware of his rights.

“I was struggling financially. I couldn’t find a job. I was lost in everything,” he told Bolts. “It was years later before I actually considered even thinking about voting.”

Glover eventually learned his rights and started working to engage others in democracy. Last year, he founded F.A.I.R Voting Alliance, a nonprofit that advocates for more inclusive election procedures in Michigan, and this month he is celebrating a major legislative victory: The state is about to make it a lot easier for people who exit prison to end up on voter rolls. 

State lawmakers last week adopted House Bill 4983, which would put Michigan in a unique class. If signed by the governor, this would be the first law in the nation to require a state to register people to vote when they’re released from prison.

The state would later send people mail notifying them that they have been registered to vote, as well as giving them the option to decline and opt out of voter rolls. 

Michigan first adopted automatic voter registration in 2018 as part of Proposal 3, a ballot measure that voters overwhelmingly approved. The idea is for public agencies to leverage their existing interactions with citizens to register them to vote, relieving individuals of that burden and shifting it to the state. But, like in most of the other states that have set up this program, Michigan has only implemented it to add people to voter rolls when they get, renew, or update their driver’s licenses or state IDs.

HB 4983 would significantly expand automatic voter registration by ordering the Department of Corrections to implement it as well; at least 8,000 people are released from state prison each year in Michigan, according to the secretary of state’s office. The bill would also bring other agencies into the program, building on steps that a few states have already taken to register people when they obtain a Native American tribal ID, or when they sign up for Medicaid. 

“We wanted to include more than just driver’s licenses so that we could really get people registered any time they’re interacting with our government, which includes Medicaid offices and the Department of Corrections,” state Representative Penelope Tsernoglou, the Democrat who sponsored the legislation, told Bolts. 

Tsernoglou was first elected in 2022 as part of a blue surge that delivered full control of Michigan’s state government to the Democratic Party for the first time since the 1980s. Democrats have passed a number of major voting bills this year, and HB 4983 itself is part of a broad voting-rights package that now awaits the signature of Democratic Governor Gretchen Whitmer, who has supported other efforts to expand ballot access. 

Voting rights advocates in Michigan say they’re confident she will sign these new reforms; her office would not specify her plans when asked by Bolts. 

These advocates wanted to build on the 2018 ballot initiative to expand its reach. “Prop 3 was a huge step in the right direction, but there were a lot of people not interacting [with a driver’s license office] so conversations since then really centered around how to reach people where they’re at,” said Ben Gardner, Michigan campaign manager for All Voting Is Local, a national organization. This bill also authorizes Michigan to still identify other public agencies in the future that could also automatically register people to vote.

Michigan is already better than most states at registering people to vote, but there are still hundreds of thousands of eligible Michiganders who aren’t registered—and that population includes disproportionate numbers of low-income people and people of color, voting rights advocates say. They’re confident that, if Whitmer signs the bill to strengthen automatic voter registration, it can expect to reach and sign up most of them. 

Besides applying automatic voter registration to more agencies, HB 4983 would also greatly change how the program works—even at driver’s license offices. 

Right now, Michiganders are asked whether they want to opt out of having the state register them to vote in the course of the transaction in which they’re getting or updating an ID. Under HB 4983, they would no longer be asked this question while conducting this other business; instead, they would later be sent a mailer at home, and they would have to return it if they wish to not be registered.

This is known as “back-end” automatic voter registration. Data from Colorado, which has also opted for such a model, show that this system dramatically reduces the share of people who choose to opt out. This year alone, New Mexico, Oregon, and Washington, D.C., have adopted similar legislation to switch from “front-end” to “back-end” models. Oregon’s bill, like Michigan’s, also extends its program to apply to Medicaid.

The Medicaid change comes with an asterisk, though: States cannot enact it without the blessing of the federal government, which for years has held up such reforms. 

Asked about Michigan’s bill, the Biden administration told Bolts this week that it is reviewing the issue, echoing an earlier statement it shared with Bolts in July about Oregon’s bill.

“We recognize the importance of state Medicaid agencies assisting in expanding voter access and registration activities for the populations they serve,” the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) said in its new statement. “CMS is considering additional opportunities to enhance Medicaid’s role in promoting voter registration while also ensuring compliance with Medicaid confidentiality requirements.” 

But Michigan would not need to wait for any approval to enlist its prison system into expanding voter rolls.

In fact, the state has already begun experimenting with this reform through administrative changes. According to the secretary of state’s office, Michigan has given people exiting any state prison the opportunity to register to vote since 2020, through a program that helps them obtain a state ID as they re-enter society. 

HB 4983 would substantially build on that administrative effort, codifying it into law to make it a requirement for the DOC to register people. It’d also expand it to anyone released from prison independent of an ID program, and switch the procedure to a back-end model.

Michigan is particularly well positioned to leverage the point at which people leave prison to register to vote, since it’s among 24 states where people regain the right to vote as soon as they exit the prison, without any of the long waiting periods or onerous additional conditions that many other states impose. (In Maine and Vermont, plus D.C., anyone can also vote from prison) 

Erica Peresman, a voting rights attorney in Michigan, told Bolts that many formerly incarcerated people are currently disinclined to register because they’re worried about whether they’re allowed. 

“They’d be afraid of doing something wrong,” said Peresman, who is senior advisor at the Michigan nonprofit Promote the Vote. “We’d be out there at voter registration drives and people would say, ‘no, I have a felony on my record.’ They didn’t want to get in trouble, and they weren’t necessarily going to listen to some lady standing on the street with a clipboard.”

HB 4983 would solve some of that problem; formerly incarcerated people would no longer have to wonder whether it’s safe to register because the state would automatically do that for them and send them a mailer. 

Still, advocates say Michigan should go further. The state will need a “massive voter education effort” to complement the new policy, said Peresman, who warns that many who stand to be affected by the state’s recent expansions to voter rights may still not realize that they’ve been registered, or that that they could take advantage of new voting procedures like vote-by-mail

Tsernoglou, the bill’s sponsor, agrees. She wanted the legislature to also pass another bill that would have required the Department of Corrections to provide people with specific information about their voting rights. That bill, HB 4534, would have required prison officials to tell people who exit incarceration that they are eligible to vote, how to obtain a mail ballot, and when elections are held in Michigan. (The secretary of state’s office says it already provides some of this info to people leaving prison; HB 4534 would expand and codify enshrine that in law.)

The bill did not pass either chamber before the legislature adjourned last week. “I think that bill would be a prime example of something we could do additionally, next year,” Tsernoglou told Bolts. 

Another issue that the reform will likely run into is that some people who leave prison don’t have a stable address to provide. Khyla Craine, deputy legal director in the secretary of state’s office, told Bolts that her office allows people with unstable housing situations to update their addresses online; the state would work with parole and probation officers, plus community organizations like Percy Glover’s, to make sure people know how to do this, she said.

Glover said that a bill like HB 4983 can only go so far if the state does not also step up its investment in the success of people re-entering society, ensuring they have access to jobs and housing. 

“Voter economics is real,” he said. “If you are impoverished, you are not thinking about an election, and most people leaving a prison are not walking into a strong financial position. Finding somewhere to live, having transportation, having basic needs met—that’s the priority.”

The plan to automatically register people leaving prison is “very important,” he added, “but we won’t see significant turnout, as we should, without all these other layers.”

The post Michigan Law Is First to Automatically Register People to Vote As They Leave Prison appeared first on Bolts.

In this guide, Bolts introduces you to ten elections that are coming up this month that will impact how local officials administer future elections, and how easily people can exercise their voting rights. 

Voters this month will select the secretaries of state of Kentucky, Louisiana, and Mississippi, who’ll each be the chief elections officials within their state. They will choose a new supreme court justice in Pennsylvania, a swing state with looming election law battles, and dozens of county officials who’ll decide how easy it is to vote in Pennsylvania and Washington state next year. And some ballot measures may change election law in Maine and Michigan.

All these elections are scheduled for Nov. 7, except for Louisiana’s runoff on Nov. 18. 

As we cover the places where democracy is on the ballot, our staff is also keeping an eye on the other side of the coin—the people who are excluded from having a say in their democracy: Three of the eight states featured on this page have among the nation’s harshest laws barring people with criminal convictions from the polls, and our three-part series highlights their stories. And beyond the stakes for voting rights, our cheat sheet to the 2023 elections also lays out dozens of other local elections this November that will shape criminal justice, abortion access, education, and other issues. 

Kentucky | Secretary of state

Michael Adams, the Republican secretary of state of Kentucky, has vocally pushed back against the false conspiracies surrounding the 2020 election, and he has touted his efforts to facilitate mail and early voting during the pandemic. He survived the GOP primary this spring by beating back election deniers who wanted to replace him as the state’s chief election administrator.

Buddy Wheatley, Adams’ Democratic challenger and a former lawmaker, says the state should go much further in expanding ballot access. The Cincinnati Enquirer reports that the candidates disagree on whether the state should institute same-day registration and set-up an independent redistricting commission, two proposals of Wheatley’s that Adams opposes. 

The election is unfolding in the shadow of the governor’s race, in which Democratic incumbent Andy Beshear is running for reelection four years after restoring the voting rights of hundreds of thousands of people who had been barred from voting for life. (Adams and Wheatley have both said they support the executive order.) Voting rights advocates regret that the order still leaves hundreds of thousands Kentuckians shut out from voting and that the state hasn’t done enough to notify newly-enfranchised residents; Bolts reports that a coalition led by formerly incarcerated activists has stepped into that void to register people.

Louisiana | Secretary of state 

In trying to appease election deniers since the 2020 presidential election, Republican Secretary of State Kyle Ardoin weakened Louisiana’s voting system and gave a platform to election conspiracists. His successor will be decided in a Nov. 18 runoff between Republican Nancy Landry, who currently serves as his deputy, and Gwen Collins-Greenup, a Democratic attorney. Each received 19 percent of the vote in the all-party primary on Oct. 14, but Landry is favored in the Nov. 18 runoff since much of the remainder of the vote went to other Republican contenders.

Not unlike Ardoin, Landry has resisted election deniers’ most radical proposals but she has also echoed unfounded suspicions of voter fraud and election irregularities, Cameron Joseph reported in Bolts. The next secretary of state will have to deal with continued pressure from the far-right, Joseph writes, while making critical decisions regarding the state’s outdated voting equipment: The state’s efforts to replace the equipment have stalled in recent years amid unfounded election conspiracies about the role of machines in skewing election results.

Maine | Question 8

Since its drafting two centuries ago, Maine’s constitution has barred people who are under guardianship from voting in state and local elections. Then, in 2001, a federal court declared the provision to be invalid in response to a lawsuit filed by an organization that protects the rights of disabled residents.

Mainers may scrub this exclusionary language from its state constitution on Nov. 7, S.E. Smith explains in Bolts: Question 8 would “remove a provision prohibiting a person under guardianship for reasons of mental illness from voting.” While Mainers under guardianship can already vote irrespective of this constitutional amendment due to the 2001 court ruling, Smith reports that the referendum could spark momentum for other states with exclusionary rules to revise who can cast ballots and shake up what is now a complicated patchwork of eligibility rules nationwide. 

Michigan | Municipal referendums on ranked choice voting

Three Michigan cities will each decide whether to switch to ranked-choice voting—a system in which voters rank the different candidates on the ballot rather than only opting for one—for their local elections. If the initiatives pass, residents in East Lansing, Kalamazoo, and Royal Oak would join Ann Arbor, which approved a similar measure in 2021.

But there’s a catch: Even if voters approve ranked choice voting, it will not be implemented until the state of Michigan first adopts a bill authorizing the method statewide. The legislation to do so has stalled in the legislature so far.

Many cities have newly adopted ranked-choice voting in recent years, and some will use the method for the first time this November; they include Boulder, Colorado, and several Utah cities such as Salt Lake. Other municipalities this fall will also consider changing local rules: Rockville, Maryland, in the suburbs of D.C., holds two advisory referendums on whether their city should lower the voting age to 16 and enable noncitizens to vote in local elections.

Mississippi | Secretary of state

Republican Michael Watson spent his first term as secretary of state defending restrictions on ballot access. He stated he worries about more college students voting, rejected expanding mail voting during the COVID-19 pandemic, and championed a law that banned assisting people in casting an absentee ballot (the law was blocked by a court this summer). He is currently fighting  a lawsuit against the state’s practice of permanently disenfranchising people with some felony convictions.

Watson is now seeking a second term against Democrat Ty Pinkins, an attorney who only jumped into the race in September after the prior Democratic nominee withdrew for health reasons. Pinkins has taken Watson to task for backing these restrictions, and he says he is running to expand opportunities to vote, such as setting up online and same-day voter registration. Pinkins this fall also teamed up with Greta Kemp Martin—the Democrat challenging Attorney General Lynn Fitch, who is currently representing Watson in the lawsuit against felony disenfranchisement—to say that the state should expand rights restoration for people with felony convictions.

Pennsylvania | Supreme court justice

Pennsylvanians will fill a vacant seat on their state’s high court, where Democrats currently enjoy a majority. The outcome cannot change partisan control but it will still shape election law in this swing state, Bolts’ Alex Burness reports. For one, a GOP win would make it easier for the party to flip the court in 2025, affecting redistricting. It may also make it easier for the GOP to win election lawsuits next year: Voting cases haven’t always been party-line for this court, especially ones that revolve around how permissive the state should be toward mail ballots. Recent rulings made it more likely that mail ballots with clerical mistakes get tossed, an issue that now looms over the 2024 election.

Burness reports that Republican nominee Carolyn Carluccio has echoed Trump’s attacks against mail voting, implying an unfounded connection to election fraud, and she appeared to invite a new legal challenge to a state law that expanded ballot access in 2019. Dan McCaffery, her Democratic opponent, has defended state efforts to make voting more convenient, telling Bolts, “If we’re going to err, we should always err on the side of including votes.”

Pennsylvania | Bucks County commission

Pennsylvanians are electing the local officials who’ll run the 2024 elections, and the results will shape how easy it is for millions of people to vote next year in the nation’s biggest swing state. Daniel Nichanian reports in Bolts that counties have a great deal of discretion when it comes to the modalities of voting by mail, and local voting rights attorneys warn that if more counties adopt tighter rules, tens of thousands of additional ballots may be rejected.

Bucks County stands as the clearest jurisdiction to watch, Nichanian writes. Democrats gained control of the commission in 2019, part of a firewall against Trump’s efforts to game the following year’s election. The county commissioners made it easier to vote by mail, attracting legal challenges from Trump.  Now, they’re now running for reelection, but the Republican Party is hoping to gain control of this swing county’s commission. 

Also keep an eye on the Democratic efforts to retain majorities in the other Pennsylvania counties they gained in 2019, often for the first time in decades: Delaware, Chester, Lehigh, and Monroe. The GOP would also gain control of the board of elections in Allegheny County, home to Pittsburgh, if it scores an upset in the county executive race. Sam DeMarco, who signed up as a fake Trump elector in 2020, is already certain to sit on Allegheny County’s board of elections.

Pennsylvania | Berks County commission

Will any Pennsylvania county try to stall the certification of elections next year, in a repeat of Trump’s strategy in the aftermath of the 2020 presidential race? The results of next week’s elections will determine which are susceptible to try out such a strategy, Daniel Nichanian reports in Bolts. Election attorneys told him that this would be a dereliction of duties on the part of county commissioners but that it may still cause some legal and political upheaval. Already in 2022, the Republican commissioners in three counties resisted certifying results because they insisted on rejecting valid mail ballots; they’re now all seeking reelection.

The Democratic challengers running in Berks County—the most politically competitive of these three counties—say this is a key issue in their race. “The most important thing is that we have a board of commissioners that endorses the winner of a campaign,” one of them told Bolts. But they’re also running on a platform of easing mail voting by installing more accessible ballot drop boxes, and instituting new policies to notify residents if their ballots have a clerical error. Also keep an eye on Fayette and Lancaster, the other counties that tried to not certify the 2022 results, and in the many red jurisdictions where candidates with ties to election deniers made it past the Republican primaries.

Virginia | Legislative control

Since Virginia Republicans gained the governorship and state House in 2021, they have passed bills through the lower chamber to repeal same-day voter registration and get rid of ballot drop boxes, among other restrictive measures. Until now, these bills have died in the Democratic-run Senate. But will that change after Nov. 7, when Virginians elect all lawmakers?

The GOP is hoping to gain control of the Senate while defending its majority in the House, Bolts reports, a combination that would hand them full control of the state government and open the floodgates for the party’s conservative agenda on how the commonwealth should run elections. Inversely, if Democrats have a great night—flipping the House and keeping the Senate—they may have more oversight over Governor Glenn Youngkin’s dramatic curtailment of rights restoration and over his administration’s wrongful voter purges; still, those matters are decided within the executive branch, and the governor’s office is not on the ballot until 2025.

Washington | King County director of elections

Only one county in the entire state of Washington is electing its chief administrator. It just so happens to be King County, home to Seattle and more than 2 million residents—in a race that features a staunch election denier, no less. Doug Basler has sowed doubts about Washington state’s election system since the 2020 election, alongside others on the far-right, and he has helped a lawsuit against its mail voting system.

Basler is a heavy underdog on Nov. 7 in his challenge against Julie Wise, the Director of King County Elections. This is a heavily Democratic county, though there will be no partisan label on the ballot, potentially blunting the effect of Basler’s Republican affiliation. Still, Cameron Joseph reports in Bolts that the spread of false election conspiracies—even when they are defeated at the ballot box—is fueling a threatening climate. “It’s a very scary time to be an election administrator,” Wise told Bolts.

The post 10 Local Elections This Month That Matter to Voting Rights appeared first on Bolts.

Republicans were confident that they would build up power in statehouses and inflict a “bloodbath” on Democrats. Instead, they failed to win any new legislative chamber, their seat gains are minuscule by recent standards, and their strongest showings are concentrated in places they already dominate.

Democrats, meanwhile, flipped four legislative chambers and allied with centrist Republicans to wrestle a fifth chamber away from the GOP.

The results have deflated conservative ambitions to channel backlash against the sitting president to leap ahead in states, like they did in 2010 and 2014. Two years into President Barack Obama’s term, in 2010, the GOP gained more than 600 legislative seats and unleashed a torrent of right-wing laws that undercut unions and restricted voting rights. In 2014, they gained roughly 250 seats, according to data compiled by Ballotpedia. Democrats returned the favor in 2018 by gaining more than 300 legislative seats, powered by President Donald Trump’s widespread unpopularity. 

No such wave occurred in 2022. Republicans gained only 20 legislative seats this fall out of more than 6,000 that were on the ballot, according to Bolts’s review of the results. (Editor’s note: The analysis was updated in January with final results in a dozen races that were pending recounts as of publication. One election in New Hampshire ended in an exact tie after a recount.) 

And it gets worse for Republicans. While they managed to net a few seats overall, their biggest gains came in chambers that they already massively control, such as the West Virginia or South Carolina houses, or else in New York, where they are deeply in the minority. 

By contrast, Democrats soared in closely-divided legislatures and seized four previously GOP-held chambers: Michigan’s House and Senate, Minnesota’s Senate, and Pennsylvania’s House. In addition, the GOP seems to have lost control of Alaska’s Senate; a group made up of centrist Republicans and Democratic senators announced on Friday that they would form a coalition to run the chamber. We may not know until 2023 if a similar coalition emerges in the Alaska House, or if the GOP can coalesce to win control of that chamber.

This table details the partisan make-up of each state chamber, plus the D.C. council, before and after the Nov. 8 elections.
 

I attributed vacant seats to the party that held them most recently. For the purpose of quantifying a swing and being consistent, I counted lawmakers who left their party since the last election but did not join or caucus with the other party as belonging to their original party. (This applied to one lawmaker in each of Arkansas, Minnesota, New Hampshire, New Mexico, and Tennessee.) I counted lawmakers who outright switched parties, or who left their original party to caucus or ally with the other party, as belonging to their new party. In addition, I counted the Alaska and Washington lawmakers who remain in one party but caucus with another as belonging to the party they were elected with and have chosen to keep affiliating with.

Below are five takeaways from what transpired in state legislatures.

1. Democrats land new trifectas

Democrats may have lost a small number of seats this cycle—overall, they will have about a dozen fewer seats than before, if current results hold—but they hit the jackpot due to how their gains and losses were spread out.

In flipping the Michigan legislature and the Minnesota Senate, Democrats took full control of these states’ governments. This is a historic achievement for Michigan Democrats, who have not enjoyed a trifecta—one-party control of both legislative chambers and the governorship—in nearly 40 years.

Democrats also gained two trifectas in Maryland and Massachusetts, where they already controlled the legislature, when Democrats Wes Moore and Maura Healey won gubernatorial elections to replace outgoing GOP governors.

Democrats lost their trifecta in Nevada when Democratic Governor Steve Sisolak lost, even as they strengthened their legislative majorities there. Of course, they also lost their trifecta in the federal government. In addition, Democrats gained new supermajorities in the Vermont legislature, which will give them the ability to override vetoes by Republican Governor Phil Scott. 

Republicans, by contrast, gained no new trifecta. They also failed to gain new veto-proof legislatures in states where Democratic governors wield the veto pen. And they lost control of Arizona’s state government for the first time since 2009: Democrat Katie Hobbs will replace the outgoing Republican governor even as the GOP keeps bare legislative majorities.

In all, an additional 26 million Americans will live in states run by Democratic trifectas as a result of the 2022 midterms. Seven million fewer Americans will live in states run by GOP trifectas.

2. Legislative shifts bring big policy ramifications

Michigan and Minnesota may be the two most intriguing states heading into the 2023 legislative sessions given their new Democratic majorities. In 2018 and 2019, Colorado and Virginia Democrats similarly gained control of a legislature after long being locked out of power, and they rapidly adopted a flurry of progressive priorities such as abolishing the death penalty.

Democrats in Michigan and Minnesota have already signaled a desire to strengthen labor and environmental laws. The shifts will also have major repercussions for criminal justice policy and voting rights. Minnesota Democrats are pushing for legislation legalizing marijuana, while Michigan Democrats will now have authority to oversee the implementation of new voting protections that the electorate approved in November.

Pennsylvania Democrats won’t control the entire state government since the GOP retains the state Senate, but their new majority in the House has huge implications: It immediately kills a package of constitutional amendments that would have restricted abortion rights, among other drastic changes. Republicans in the legislature were looking to get around the governor’s veto power, but this required them to pass amendments they adopted this year in next year’s session again. “We stopped these constitutional amendments in their tracks,” a Pennsylvania Democrat told CBS.

In the 35 states where one of the parties defended their existing trifecta—including California, Illinois, and New York for Democrats, and Georgia, Florida, and Texas for Republicans—upcoming legislative sessions will see the heaviest activity, with measures strengthening or restricting access to abortion likely to be at the frontlines. 

Among many issues, Bolts will track the fate of abortion rights in GOP-run states—Florida Republicans have already signaled they will champion new restrictions—and keep an eye on whether New Mexico and Oregon Democrats return to landmark voting rights bills that stalled this year. In Rhode Island, a pair of lawmakers who have experienced the criminal legal system from the inside are now looking to bring more awareness to the burdens of re-entry for formerly incarcerated residents.

3. Republicans solidify power in red states

Eight years ago, Democrats still controlled both chambers of the West Virginia legislature. Now they can barely win elections in the state.

Republicans gained 17 legislative seats in West Virginia alone—by far their biggest jump anywhere—which accounts for much of their nationwide progress and gives them gigantic majorities of 30-4 and 88-12 in the state Senate and House.

Republicans similarly strengthened their dominance in Kentucky, another state where Democrats ran the legislature a decade ago but where the GOP will now enjoy majorities nearly as large as in West Virginia. The GOP also gained at least five seats in each of Arkansas, South Carolina, and Wyoming.

Republicans’ most dramatic gains came in Florida, where a combination of a strong GOP performance, dismal Democratic turnout, heavy conservative spending, voter intimidation, and newly-drawn gerrymanders gave the party supermajorities in both chambers. Still, Republicans already dominated state politics, though their new margins will further enable them to sideline Democrats and circumvent legislative rules, The Miami Herald reports.

Republicans also gained a supermajority in the heavily-gerrymandered Wisconsin Senate; they have already signaled they may use that margin to remove Democratic officials from office. But they failed to win a supermajority in the lower chamber, which will keep them from overriding Democratic Governor Tony Evers’s vetoes, and an early vacancy in a somewhat competitive Senate district gives Democrats a shot to erase the supermajority.

The GOP also fell just short of its goal to secure a supermajority in Nebraska’s ostensibly nonpartisan unicameral legislature, which will enable Democrats to continue blocking bills like tax cuts through the chamber’s generous filibuster rules; but pro-choice advocates are already warning that one Democratic senator’s opposition to abortion may allow Republicans to push through an abortion ban.

4. And Democrats solidify power in blue states

Mirroring Democrats’ growing struggles in the South, Republicans keep sinking further in Colorado. The state’s upper-chamber was under GOP control as recently as four years ago, but Democrats expanded their majority this fall to a large 23-12 edge; in the state House, they gained a new supermajority.

Other blue states also doubled down. Democrats gained seats and solidified supermajorities in Massachusetts, Maryland, and likely California, and gained new veto-proof majorities in Vermont. New York Democrats also appear to have retained the supermajorities they painstakingly gained in the 2020 cycle, despite losing ground. The exception is Oregon, where a three-seat loss means that Democrats will no longer enjoy the three-fifth majorities that are needed to pass tax bills.

What made a difference in the parties’ fortunes is that Democrats’ largest gains came in swing states: They will have 13 more seats in Pennsylvania and at least 10 more in New Hampshire; those are the only two states other than West Virginia that saw double-digit seat swings. (The GOP will have a bare majority in the New Hampshire House.) And while the shifts in Michigan and Minnesota were comparatively very small, Democrats got exactly what they needed: they flipped three chambers with no seats to spare.

5. Independent maps and gerrymanders made a difference

Throughout the 2010s, Michigan voted under maps gerrymandered by the GOP. This enabled Republicans to retain the legislature even when Democratic candidates won more votes. In 2018, voters approved a measure to impose an independent redistricting process, and 2022 was the first cycle held under maps freed of the Republican gerrymander. 

The outcome: Democrats once again won the popular vote; and this time, that secured them actual majorities. 

Other states used maps that were drawn by courts or independent redistricting panels, including Arizona, California, Colorado, and Pennsylvania. But many other legislative battles were waged under heavily gerrymandered maps. That includes Illinois and Maryland on the Democratic side, and large red states—Florida, Tennessee, Texas—for the GOP. 

Georgia and Wisconsin stick out as rare states that are very competitive in federal elections but where a party—Republicans in each case—has effectively locked down legislative majorities through its control of the mapping process. In Wisconsin, Republicans will control 86 seats going forward, to Democrats’ 46, despite the state being evenly divided.

In red states, one effect of GOP gerrymanders was a large decline in the number of so-called majority-minority districts, seats where people of color make up a majority. An analysis by Pluribus News shows that the drop is most pronounced in Florida and Texas, where Republicans drew new maps.

State advocates were already denouncing this when the maps were drawn last year. “How do we face the challenges in the places of Texas we all call home if our voting power is taken from us?” Valerie Street, president of Our Vote Texas, told The Texas Tribune in 2021.

An earlier version of the article contained an incorrect spelling of the name of Massachusetts Governor-Elect Maura Healey.

The post In Legislative Elections, Democrats Defied Recent History appeared first on Bolts.

Pennsylvanians on Tuesday resoundingly rejected the man who had wanted to ignore their vote but now was asking for it. In this perennially tight state, Mastriano lost to Democratic nominee Josh Shapiro by fifteen percentage points.

He was joined in defeat by many other Republicans who echoed Trump’s Big Lie while trying to take over their states’ election administration. (Most states directly elect a secretary of state, unlike in Pennsylvania.) Voters around the country repudiated candidates who signaled they may override the will of the very electorate they were courting.

All election deniers who ran for secretary of state in battleground states—buoyed by endorsements from Trump—lost on Tuesday, blocking major avenues for the former president to manipulate the next election.

Jim Marchant, the Republican nominee in Nevada, came closest, losing to Democrat Francisco Aguilar by two percentage points. In Michigan, Minnesota, and New Mexico, incumbent Democratic secretaries of state crushed their far-right challengers Kristina Karamo, Kim Crockett, and Audrey Trujillo by margins ranging from 9 to 14 percentage points—all far more than Joe Biden’s margins of victory two years ago.

Mark Finchem, an Arizona lawmaker who has since 2020 championed proposals to decertify his own state’s presidential results, repeated just this fall that the votes of Arizona’s two most populous counties should be “tossed out.” He lost his bid on Tuesday, trailing in both of these counties decisively.

Election deniers also failed to take over secretary of state offices in blue states like Massachusetts and Vermont, lost elections for governor in places where the winner can appoint a secretary of state, and fell short for other offices from which they may have exerted significant if indirect influence on elections, such as Michigan’s attorney general or New Mexico’s supreme court. 

“The Big Lie movement has its die hard acolytes, and they’ve captured a huge swath of the Republican Party, but it’s not a winning majority,” Ian Bassin, executive director of the organization Protect Democracy, told Bolts. “In fact, it’s politically toxic, and in competitive states is a lead anchor around the neck of anyone that embraces it.”

Still, Republicans who ran on the Big Lie did not end up empty handed.

A nationwide Bolts analysis in September found that 12 Republicans were running for secretary of state after denying the results of the 2020 election or refusing to affirm the outcome. Eight of them lost. But they won in four red states: Alabama, Indiana, South Dakota, and Wyoming.

“What happened with the election results moved us from the precipice,” Rick Hasen, a professor at UCLA Law who specializes in election law and has written about the threat of election subversion, told Bolts. “We won’t have many election deniers running elections, and probably none or few in swing states.”

“Still there are hundreds of Republican candidates who embraced election denialism and won their races,” he said. “Maybe it’s just cheap talk and it is less worrisome—but it is still antidemocratic and shows that denialism could easily surface again in 2024 or beyond.”

Election deniers won many offices, from Congress down to county commissions, that have important powers when it comes to deciding how to run elections. And two governors with the authority to select secretaries of state, Ron DeSantis of Florida and Greg Abbott of Texas, won reelection; both have previously appointed secretaries who refused to affirm Biden’s election or helped Trump try to overturn the 2020 race.

Many states that did not feature outright election deniers still saw conflicts over new restrictions and rules to combat fraud. When the dust settled, incumbents did well: Democrats secured new terms in Colorado and Washington State, and Republicans did the same in Georgia, Iowa, and Ohio. In Connecticut and Vermont, Democrats prevailed in open seats who have signaled interest in expanding ballot access.

Some secretaries of state in recent years have stepped in against threats to election systems—and Tuesday’s results at least removed the threat that local election deniers will be bolstered by more sympathetic statewide officials, at least in blue and purple states. 

Trujillo, the New Mexico Republican, had stood in solidarity with a county commission that refused to certify its primary results this summer over bogus fraud claims. The local county clerk, a Republican who fought back against the commission, told Bolts in September that Democratic Secretary of State Maggie Toulouse Oliver had backed her and that an election denier taking over instead would make her job trickier.

Some secretaries of state are also tasked with certifying their state’s final results, and election observers worried that an official like Finchem or a Mastriano appointee could try to not certify legitimate outcomes they don’t like. In states where they are not involved in certification, secretaries of state have other significant powers. Michigan, for instance, has one of the most decentralized electoral systems in the country, loosely held together by a secretary of state’s authority. Karamo, the GOP nominee, campaigned on proposals to upend this system, some of which she would not have had the legal authority to order. 

Elections for secretaries of state typically happen away from the spotlight, but Trump’s Stop the Steal agitation morphed into an organized effort to recruit and run far-right candidates willing to follow his lead in disrupting U.S. elections. 

Marchant, the Nevada candidate, played a lead role in putting together a national slate called “America First” that brought together 14 secretary of state candidates, all Republicans who ran on introducing election changes in line with Trump’s Big Lie conspiracies, such as cracking down on mail-in voting or ballot drop boxes. 

In the lead-up to November, election deniers also partnered with far-right organizations and like-minded allies in law enforcement and sheriff’s offices to drum up policing and investigations into elections. Florida voted this year under the cloud of the arrests of formerly incarcerated people, who have been targeted by DeSantis’s administration amid shifting eligibility requirements for people with criminal records.

This national coordination among election deniers sparked a counter-mobilizing effort from Democrats who rushed to bring more voter attention to these races.

“Mr. and Mrs. Minnesota are not getting up every day saying, ‘Gee, I wonder what’s going on with the secretary of state’s office right now,’” Steve Simon, the Democratic incumbent in Minnesota, told Politico in October. “And so I do think that someone running for this office generically—me or anyone else—every four years, you’d have to treat it as an exercise of introducing or reintroducing yourself.”

The New York Times reports that Democrats sank nearly $50 million into TV ads for secretary of state races in the four tightest states featuring election deniers for secretary of state—Arizona, Michigan, Minnesota and Nevada—and outspent Republicans 10 to 1. Mastriano was also significantly outspent. He was one of only two candidates for governor on the “America First,” alongside the GOP nominee in Arizona, Kari Lake. Both had lost their bids as of Monday night.

Of the 14 “America First” candidates who ran for secretary of state, nine lost in Republican primaries and four lost in last week’s general election.

Those defeated in primaries include Colorado’s Tina Peters, a county clerk under indictment for breaching the integrity of voting machines, and Idaho’s Dorothy Moon, who once defended voter restrictions on the floor of the legislature based on unfounded allegations that Canadians are coming to Idaho to vote illegally. Others lost to Republican incumbents in primaries in Georgia, Kansas, and Nebraska.

The slate’s only victorious candidate is Diego Morales, who is now poised to take over as secretary of state in Indiana.

Morales echoed Trump’s claims about fraud and called the 2020 election a “scam” to oust the incumbent at the Indiana Republican Party’s state convention. He later softened those statements, calling Biden the legitimate president, but he remains on the website of the “America First” organization as of publication. He beat Democrat Destiny Wells, who hit him for his ties with the far-right, by 14 percentage points.

Three other candidates who espoused aspects of the Big Lie prevailed last week, though they were not part of the “America First” slate. 

Much like Morales, Monae Johnson used conspiracist allegations about election systems to oust South Dakota’s incumbent at a party convention. Her general election was largely a formality in this staunchly conservative state.

In Alabama, winner Wes Allen has questioned the results of the 2020 election, and he has already signaled how that may affect his state. He said earlier this year that, should he win, he would withdraw Alabama from the Electronic Registration Information Center (ERIC), an organization that helps 32 states, and Washington D.C., maintain voter rolls. He explained his position by naming George Soros, shortly after a far-right website published an article that falsely tied ERIC to Soros.

In Wyoming, finally, Chuck Gray secured Trump’s endorsement to win the Republican nod for secretary of state in August, and then ran unopposed in last week’s general election. Gray has called the 2020 election “clearly rigged,” and has focused his attacks on the use of ballot drop boxes, echoing the debunked claims about the “woke left” using drop boxes to steal elections. He has also traveled to other states to meet with election deniers and observe their efforts to sow doubts on results.

These four states are deeply Republican, and the next presidential race is unlikely to be contested in any of them. Still, Democrats are competitive in plenty of elections in those states. Last week, Democratic U.S. Rep. Frank Mrvan’s re-election bid in Indiana was one of the nation’s closest watched. In 2017, Democrats gained a U.S. Senate seat in Alabama, in a special election that Republican nominee Roy Moore tried to block in court in an eerie trial run of Trump’s efforts in late 2020. Republican primaries can be competitive and need to be certified as well.

“It’s a danger to American democracy for people detached from reality and in hock to a political cult to hold governing responsibilities no matter what state they’re in,” Bassin said. “That’s true just as a matter of principle and democratic health, but it’s also the case that even the most deep red states have had contentious elections in recent years and will again.”

“No one should have to rely on a delusional partisan to oversee their elections,” he added.

Since Tuesday’s clobbering, few election deniers have shown a willingness to accept the outcomes. Mastriano, perhaps chastened by the magnitude of his defeat, issued a concession on Sunday evening. “Difficult to accept as the results are, there is no right course but to concede, which I do,” he said in a statement on social media. 

But Finchem retweeted a message last week from a supporter who called the outcome a “Soros orchestrated psychological operation!” after the media called the race for Democrat Adrian Fontes, and he has since repeatedly insinuated that voter fraud was at play.

And those who won now have a platform from which add the imprimatur of a state agency onto baseless allegations of widespread voter fraud.

On Saturday, four days after becoming Wyoming’s Secretary of State-Elect, Gray posted a picture of himself at an event with a conservative activist, former Trump campaign adviser, and also president of the organization Citizens United, who most recently produced a movie that Trumpworld has embraced about the 2020 election. Gray tweeted, “Really enjoyed meeting David Bossie today and seeing his film Rigged.”

The article has been updated with the most up-to-date results as of the evening of Nov. 14.

The post In Secretary of State Races, Election Deniers (Mostly) Lose appeared first on Bolts.

In Michigan and Connecticut, they made it easier for people to vote early in future elections. In at least six localities, voters adopted ranked-choice voting. Oakland, California, adopted a new experiment in leveling the playing field in campaign spending. And other measures will try out new approaches to increasing participation locally. 

“It’s great to see voters embracing pro-democracy reforms to make the voting process easier and more inclusive,” Josh Douglas, a University of Kentucky professor who specializes in election law and was watching a wide array of ballot measures on Tuesday, told Bolts. “When we make it easy to vote, and when turnout improves as a result, then democracy wins.”

The biggest expansion of ballot access on Tuesday comes with the passage of Michigan’s Proposal 2, a catchall measure that amends the state constitution to make voting easier while also protecting against efforts to curtail voting rights launched in the aftermath of the 2020 presidential election. 

The proposal, backed by a coalition of Michigan organizations that support expanding voting rights, will establish nine days of early in-person voting, create new mandates for townships to set up ballot drop boxes, and supply state-funded postage to vote by mail. It passed handily with 60 percent of the vote.

“It’s the role of our government to make sure people have the ability to vote and aren’t bogged down by constructed barriers,” Branden Snyder, co-executive director of a Detroit group backing the measure, told Bolts in October. 

Yvonne White, president of NAACP Michigan, another member of the coalition, celebrated the result this week, stating in a press release that, “Proposal 2 helps to ensure that every eligible voter in Michigan will have their vote counted without intimidation, harassment or interference.”

Early voting also notched a win in Connecticut, which has some of the nation’s strictest rules for people who hope to vote before an Election Day; voters there adopted a constitutional amendment that authorizes the legislature to set up early voting. (It does not mandate this, unlike Michigan’s.)

At the local level, voters adopted a variety of innovations in campaign and voting procedures, with an eye to revitalizing democracy. Oakland, California passed a measure to revamp campaign finance and implement a democracy vouchers program in future local elections. It leads with 69 percent of the vote as of publication.

The program would provide each eligible voter with four $25 vouchers to donate to the candidate of their choice for upcoming city and school board elections, Bolts reported in July. Proponents of Measure W, modeled after a similar one that passed in Seattle in 2017, hope to draw more residents into the electoral process as small donors and candidates, while also increasing transparency in campaign finance. Since Seattle implemented its program, it has seen a 350 percent increase in the number of donors per race, and the pool of candidates in local races has diversified.

Other provisions in Measure W would lower the cap on campaign contributions for city races to $600, and require campaign ads to list their top three contributors. Jonathan Mehta Stein, executive director of California Common Cause, which supported the measure, says democratizing campaign funding is a means of democratizing the governing process.

“We have hyper concentrated political giving in the hands of a tiny and totally non-representative slice of Oakland,” Stein told Bolts. “The majority of Oakland, which is working class and communities of color, has virtually no political giving power—and that changes who can run for and win, and it changes what ideas are taken seriously.”

Oakland also appeared poised to adopt a separate initiative to enable noncitizen residents who have children in city schools to vote in school board races. Noncitizen voting, which has long existed in some localities around the country, has spread over the past year, including to some municipalities in Vermont. But voters in Oregon’s Multnomah County turned down a measure on the issue on Tuesday, and Ohio voters adopted a constitutional amendment to ban noncitizen voting in local and state elections. 

In San Francisco, California, and Boulder, Colorado, voters approved proposals to move city elections from odd-numbered to even-numbered years so that they coincide with federal and statewide elections, which will boost turnout.

And at least six jurisdictions nationwide voted to institute new ranked-choice voting systems. Proponents of the procedure, which asks people to rank candidates by order of preference rather than just opt for one, say it helps better reflect voters’ preferences.

Ranked-choice measures appear to have passed in Ojaj, California; Fort Collins, Colorado; Evanston, Illinois; Portland, Maine; Portland, Oregon; and Multnomah County, Oregon (which includes Portland). In Washington State, Clark and San Juan counties rejected ranked-choice voting, and the fate of a similar measure in Seattle was inconclusive as of publication.

But all eyes were in Nevada, a critical swing state voting on whether to adopt ranked-choice voting for state and congressional races; Alaska and Maine are the only states that already do this. Ballot Question 3 leads by 3 percentage points as of publication, with remaining ballots likely to lean in its favor. (Update: The Nevada Independent called the referendum in favor of Question 3 on Nov. 11.)

Before ranked-choice voting comes to Nevada, though, voters would need to approve it a second time in 2024 due to the state’s multi-year process for adopting constitutional amendments.

As Bolts reported in September, establishment politicians from both parties criticized the measure as too complicated and confusing for voters. But proponents of Question 3, which would also get rid of the state’s closed primaries, saw it as shifting power away from big-party politics and back to voters in a state where the largest plurality of voters are either nonpartisan or members of a minority party. 

According to FairVote, a national organization that supports ranked-choice voting, Tuesday’s results mean that there are now 61 jurisdictions that will use ranked-choice voting in their elections. Critical elections, including a U.S. Senate race in Alaska, a U.S. House race in Maine, and the DA race in San Francisco, are set to be resoled by ranked-choice voting in coming weeks.

The energy around these democracy measures come at the same time that voting rights have come under attack. 

Michigan’s ballot proposal was written to include defensive measures against the attacks on election systems that emerged from the Trumpian lie that the 2020 election results in Michigan were invalid. Conspiracies about widespread fraud resulted in at least one county canvasser board resisting certifying election results, outside groups calling for an independent audit of statewide results, and Republican legislators introducing a slate of bills that hemmed in people’s ability to access the ballot. 

The drafters of Proposal 2 countered each of these attempts with a specific reform. A 2021 petition to conduct an independently-funded “forensic audit” of 2020 election results, for example, was met with a provision in the ballot measure establishing that only election officials can conduct audits.  

Also on Tuesday, Michigan Democrats gained control of the state government for the first time in nearly 40 years by flipping the state legislature, and they also maintained control of the governorship and state Supreme Court, which may aid the measure’s implementation given Democrats’ broader support for these reforms.

And a candidate who was running to take over election administration in Michigan on a platform of similar conspiracies handily lost on Tuesday in the secretary of state race. (Many other election deniers fared very poorly around the country.)

The fate of some ballot measures remained uncertain as of Thursday. In Arizona, measures to tighten voter ID requirements or make it harder to pass future initiatives were unresolved as of publication, with hundreds of thousands of ballots left to process.

The article has been updated on Nov. 11 with more information about elections in Nevada and San Francisco.

The post The Ballot Measures That Revamped Voting on Tuesday appeared first on Bolts.

The result in Michigan will have the most immediate effects since, unlike California and Vermont, Michigan has a statutory ban on abortion on the books. Proposal 3, which affirms a “fundamental right to reproductive freedom,” passed on Tuesday, overturning the state’s abortion ban and protecting access going forward. ABC News called the race in favor of the measure which, as of publication, led 53 percent to 47 percent.

Meanwhile,  California voters overwhelmingly to  add a “fundamental right to choose to have an abortion” and a “fundamental right to choose or refuse contraceptives” to the state’s constitution. Vermont voters also approved language adding a  “right to personal reproductive autonomy” to that state’s constitution by a wide margin on Tuesday.  

Whether state constitutions protect abortion rights—and how state courts interpret those protections—has been a critical question in the aftermath of the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision to overrule Roe v. Wade. The conservative court’s ruling only concerned whether abortion rights were protected under the federal constitution, but each state’s constitution can set higher standards for the protection of individual rights and liberties. Additionally, though individual rights to contraception are currently recognized by the Supreme Court’s decision in Griswold v. Connecticut, many observers have speculated that the Court may overrule that decision, too. Accordingly, it is significant that all three constitutional amendments that passed tonight also recognize—explicitly or implicitly—individual rights to contraception.

An analysis published by Bolts in July found that a dozen state supreme courts have ruled that their states’ constitution recognizes abortion rights. But until Tuesday, no state constitution explicitly declared such a right; judges in those states relied on provisions that talked about a right to privacy or about due process. California, Michigan, and Vermont are the first three states to add provisions into their constitution that explicitly codify the right to an abortion. 

They likely will not be the last, with Democratic governors around the country calling for similar amendments and with abortion-rights advocates motivated by tonight’s results.

In states with abortion bans, advocates have also turned to courts to challenge their legality under state constitutions, hoping that more judges might recognize abortion protections.

Tuesday’s elections decided the courts’ balance of power in populous states that may face showdowns over abortion rights. The GOP gained a new majority on the state supreme court in North Carolina, and narrowly retained its majority in Ohio; Democrats are favored to retain their majority on the Michigan supreme court. In another major race where abortion was on the line, Republicans also failed to take full control of the state government in Pennsylvania, another battleground on the issue; Governor-elect Josh Shapiro, a Democrat, favors abortion rights and would be poised to veto bills that carry restrictions.

Tuesday’s results build on the landslide in favor of abortion rights in a referendum in Kansas in August. Earlier this year, Republican lawmakers in Kansas proposed a constitutional amendment that would have effectively overruled a landmark decision by the Kansas supreme court in 2019 protecting abortion rights, but Kansas voters rejected that amendment.

Kentuckyians were similarly voting on Tuesday on a constitutional amendment that would have declared that their state constitution does not protect abortion rights, and just like Kansas they rejected the measure. The result is welcome news to abortion-rights advocates and opponents of the proposed amendment, which significantly outraised and outspent supporters. However, the failure of the amendment itself will not legalize abortion in Kentucky. Ongoing litigation at the Kentucky Supreme Court, which concerns whether the state constitution implicitly includes abortion rights, will ultimately determine the legality of abortion in the commonwealth. 

Also in Kentucky, a conservative lawmaker who championed abortion restrictions in the legislature lost an election to join the state supreme court.  

Montana decided yet another measure pertaining to abortion on Tuesday. Unlike the other referendums, this concerned a state statute that required medical care be given to any infant “born alive” after induced labor, cesarean sections, or attempted abortions. The bill was drafted to mirror model legislation advanced by national anti-abortion groups, and was condemned by abortion-rights advocates and abortion providers as addressing a non-existent problem—especially given the rarity of late-term abortions generally. The measure appeared to be failing on Tuesday night, but regardless would likely have little impact on the legality and availability of abortion in Montana.

Of Tuesday’s referendums, Michigan’s Prop 3 drew the most attention heading into Tuesday. 

Passage of the measures in California and Vermont was never seriously in doubt given both states’ socially liberal bent. Both states enable abortion access, and the California Supreme Court has recognized an implicit state constitutional right to reproductive rights since the early 1980s. However, the addition of explicit constitutional protections further entrenches abortion rights in both states, and insulates them from the prospect of future supreme courts changing course.

Michigan, though, is more politically divided and Prop 3 faced a heavy opposition campaign. Attacks from opponents of the measure falsely argued that passage of the amendment would allow children to have access to “gender change therapy without parental consent,” a charge that appeared in television advertisements and was widely condemned as false.

The measure was also set to offset the status quo. The U.S. Supreme Court’s Dobbs decision “triggered” old statutes outlawing abortion in many states around the country. In some places, this meant returning to laws that were a century old—and in some cases, even older. Arizona returned to its 1864 ban, adopted when it was still a territory, and Wisconsin returned to its 1849 ban. In Michigan, the ruling threatened to reactivate the 1931 abortion ban, raising the prospect of widespread criminalization, even as some liberal prosecutors promised to resist it.

But the ban was blocked by state courts, with the state court of appeals halting the law’s enforcement and the state court of claims holding that it ran afoul of the state constitution. The issue was still pending before the state court of appeals, however, and the passage of Proposal 3 all but guarantees that the 1931 ban will be held unconstitutional.

With the amendment’s passage in hand, abortion will remain lawful in Michigan—and protected as a “fundamental right,” meaning that state courts will critically evaluate infringements on the right.

The post Measures to Protect Abortion Rights Triumph on Tuesday appeared first on Bolts.

This November, Michigan residents will decide on another “Promote the Vote” ballot measure, identical in name but introduced under much more hostile circumstances. The constitutional amendment, known as Proposal 2, was crafted in the aftermath of Republican efforts to overturn the 2020 election and the lies that followed about the state’s election systems. Some of its provisions fill in the gaps of the 2018 referendum and further ease voting procedures. But mainly, the initiative is trying to get ahead of the conspiracies—from ballot drop boxes to the funding of local offices—that have taken root in Michigan and surrounding states. 

And this time, unlike in 2018, some conservatives are fighting to sink the measure.

“It’s been very frustrating, the general attack on our election process, both ideologically and procedurally,” says Alex Rossman, external affairs director for the Michigan League for Public Policy, an organization that backs Proposal 2.

“There are two facets to the current proposal,” he explained. “One is that proactive piece in continuing to open up voting and make it easier for everyone. But unfortunately there is a defensive piece too.”

Of the nine key sections in Proposal 2, some would make new strides in expanding access. Most significantly, it would establish nine days of early in-person voting in the state. Right now, Michiganders who want to vote in-person before Election Day can do so in their local clerk’s offices with an absentee ballot, instead of having broader access to polling stations and voting machines. The measure would also supply state-funded postage to vote by mail, and create new mandates for townships to set up ballot drop boxes.

“It’s the role of our government to make sure people have the ability to vote and aren’t bogged down by constructed barriers,” says Branden Snyder, co-executive director of the group Detroit Action, another member of the coalition that backs the measure.

But much of Proposal 2 is driven by a separate goal: to protect Michigan’s election systems from the shockwaves of the Big Lie. The measure contains provisions to protect the process of certifying results to lower the chances that an election is overturned, and to narrow who can audit election results to prevent an Arizona-style spectacle. 

Election deniers may gain more power in Michigan this fall as candidates aligned with former President Donald Trump are also running for secretary of state and attorney general. For proponents of Proposal 2, these circumstances make it urgent to strengthen the protections embedded in the state constitution. 

Widespread conspiracies about voter fraud surrounding the 2020 election set off a pattern of right-wing attacks on voting access in Michigan that manifested in the legislature and in election-governing bodies practically from the moment votes were tallied on election day. 

The afternoon after the election, poll challengers stormed a large polling place in Detroit during the last election in an attempt to halt the vote count. The scene became so rowdy that some had to be escorted away by police. Over the following weeks, the board of canvassers in Detroit’s Wayne County, a Democratic stronghold, nearly failed to certify election results after the two Republican members initially voted not to certify based on imbalances in the poll books, without pointing to evidence of fraud. The board eventually certified the results, but only after hours of uncertainty that riveted the nation. 

Even after Joe Biden was declared the winner, Trump continued to falsely allege widespread fraud in Detroit, which led groups loyal to the former president to file a petition for a “forensic audit” of the results in 2021. The petition provided for the audit to be funded privately, with sources remaining anonymous. The independent audit has not happened, but an official audit conducted by the state found no evidence of significant fraud. 

Proposal 2 is meant to forestall such scenarios in the future and strengthen the hands of those who would fight back. 

One provision would specify that, when they fulfill their role of certifying election results, county and state boards of canvassers are allowed to consider nothing but “the official records of votes cast” and aggregating them. This is their ““ministerial, clerical, nondiscretionary,” the text says.

Election law experts consulted by Bolts said Michigan law already disallows canvassers from doing more, for instance by purporting to conduct their own investigations. But they were mixed on whether adding language in the state constitution about this would make a difference.

Leah Litman, a professor of law at the University of Michigan, told Bolts in September that some Republican canvassers still went rogue in the past and that they may try to bend the law again But John Douglas, a University of Kentucky professor specialized in election law, believes the addition may still be meaningful. “It’s not harmful to lay it out so it’s abundantly clear,” he said. 

“I think that makes it even clearer to the canvassers that they can’t choose not to certify,” he added. “It gives them much less wiggle room to try to justify their actions.”

Proposal 2 would also establish that only election officials such as the secretary of state can conduct post-election audits, not private groups. And it would require that all audit funding be publicly disclosed. These reforms would remove the possibility of any “forensic audit” funded of the sort that Trump supporters tried to push for in 2021. 

The constitutional amendment would also address some of the voter restrictions championed by Republican lawmakers since 2020. State senators last year introduced a sweeping package of 39 bills that targeted aspects of the 2020 election that became conservative flashpoints. 

Some of the bills targeted ballot drop boxes, which have become a heated target of fraud conspiracies in Michigan and elsewhere (they are no longer even available in Wisconsin) despite widespread evidence that they are safe.  Another swath targeted the availability of absentee voting; it prohibited local clerks from providing prepaid postage on absentee ballots and from mailing absentee ballot applications to voters who did not request one. 

Absentee voting was authorized without an excuse in Michigan by the 2018 constitutional amendment, and implemented in a major election for the first time in 2020. 

“Part of the challenge in Michigan is that the 2020 election was when those 2018 reforms took hold,” Rossman said. “So they were unfortunately made into a scapegoat by some individuals questioning the election outcome.”

Michigan Republicans also tried to pass a bill that would have barred local governments from accepting outside donations to help fund elections systems. The bill came out of the right-wing backlash that greeted the 2020 grants made by a national foundation that distributed money donated by Facebook founder Mark Zuckeberg and Priscilla Chan to local offices nationwide, to help them prepare and run elections during a pandemic; close to 500 cities and townships obtained those grants in Michigan alone. 

Since 2020, other states have passed such legislation since 2020, including new limitations on mail-in voting and bans on local governments accepting donations. But these bills had no chance of becoming law this past session given Democratic Governor Gretchen Whitmer’s veto power. (Whitmer is up for re-election this fall.) Secure MI Vote, a committee that is backed by a GOP-aligned dark-money group and that has also received donations from the Michigan Republican Party, championed a ballot measure that would have put many of these measures to voters directly, circumventing the governor. But the organization did not gather enough signatures by the filing deadline and their initiative won’t appear on the November ballot.

Instead, voting rights proponents managed to qualify Proposal 2, which aims to put language into the state constitution that would close the door to many of these restrictions.

Proposal 2 would require municipalities to have at least one drop box for every 15,000 voters; the provision also requires that they be accessible 24 hours a day in the 40 days before election day, up to 8pm on election day.

Proposal 2 would also allow local governments to accept outside grants as long as all donations are disclosed, a response to the controversy around the 2020 grants. And it would further ease the availability of mail-in voting: It would require state funding for postage for absentee ballot applications and ballots and also allowing voters to opt-in to a list to receive absentee ballots in all future elections. 

Snyder says organizers wanted to create more opportunities for people to vote who may not otherwise. “If I have a disability, if I’m a person who needs more time to review, being able to vote at home, being able to vote absentee, allows more participation,” he said. “We see that as a practical solution to the apathy that people have towards elections.” 

But Sharon Dolente, a senior advisor to the Promote the Vote coalition, told Bolts that she has noticed “a lot more opposition this time than there was in 2018. I do think the reason why we saw this is that [voting] has become a more political issue.”

For one, Republicans almost knocked Proposal 2 off the ballot. In August, the Republican members of the state Board of Canvassers overrode the recommendation of state staffers, in a dress rehearsal of GOP efforts to skew election outcomes, and they voted to disqualify Proposal 2 on the basis of the petitions’ typography; they did the same for another amendment that protects abortion rights. The Michigan State Supreme Court intervened in a pair of 5-2 decisions.

Since then, critics like Secure MI Vote have pivoted to campaigning against Proposal 2. With social media posts, yard signs, and mail flyers, the group has made the case that Promote the Vote would compromise election security. Part of their argument is that mail-in voting is unsafe. They also contend that the measure has lax voter ID laws: Proposal 2 includes a provision allowing voters to prove their identity with either a photo ID or signed affidavit. In actuality, this only continues the status quo: State law already allows a sworn affidavit as an acceptable form of voter ID. 

At least one text messaging campaign, reported by Bridge Michigan, falsely claimed that Proposal 2 would give people incarcerated in state prisons the right to vote. Michigan law currently prohibits this, and the proposal includes no language to the contrary. Bridge Michigan tied the text messages to a newly-formed political committee run by a conservative operative.

Despite this, Proposal 2 seems likely to pass. A September poll conducted by the Glengariff Group for a local news outlet showed that 70 percent of likely voters supported the measure; the poll also found that Republican-leaning respondents backed it as well.

Snyder finds that when he talks to voters—especially Black voters—about the initiatives contained in Proposal 2, and the opposition it is trying to overcome, people are incredulous that lawmakers would clamp down on their voting rights in the name of rooting out fraud—especially given the activities of the past two years.

“You’ve got people that are angry, saying, ‘You’re trying to say that we’re cheating?’” Snyder said. “You get people that are fired up, saying, ‘you’re not gonna steal my vote.’”  

The post Michigan Ballot Measure Seeks to Shield State Elections from Trumpian Conspiracies appeared first on Bolts.

For decades, over 1,600 local offices have combined to run Michigan elections in a sort of harmony. Arguably the most decentralized voting system in the country is held together by the secretary of state, who ensures that votes are counted with enough synchronicity that the public trusts the results.

This delicate network could soon be thrown into upheaval if the office is occupied by the Republican candidate for secretary of state after the 2022 midterms. Kristina Karamo, the challenger to Democratic incumbent Jocelyn Benson, has echoed former President Donald Trump’s lies that he won the 2020 election against Joe Biden. She has attacked Democrats, the media, and even members of her own party that acknowledged Joe Biden’s win as traitors, calling them “evil and wicked people.” And now she is running on making sweeping changes to the system—some of which she legally would not even have the power to enact.

Karamo, who works as an educator and served as a poll observer in 2020, is part of a slate of election deniers aligned with Trump who are now trying to win crucial positions that will oversee future races. In other states where election deniers may take over the secretary of state’s office, concerns have zeroed in on certification, the process by which officials tally and approve election results. In places like Arizona and Pennsylvania, the next secretaries of state could weaponize this typically administrative task and refuse to certify election results. 

But when it comes to elections, Michigan is not like most states. The secretary of state does not certify results; that task is in the hands of a board of canvassers, which election deniers are also working to seize. Instead, observers are warning of another constellation of threats to Michigan elections if Karamo sits at their head. 

In Michigan, every tiny village and township has a clerk who runs the local polls for state and federal races. There are 1,520 of them in total, plus another 83 at the county level that print ballots and perform canvassing. And tens of thousands of people serve as poll workers.

This year’s secretary of state race in Michigan, then, presents an unprecedented question—what happens when an election denier takes over the job of holding a scattered election system together?

Having this many election officials raises the likelihood that some of the people in these roles are themselves election deniers. Michigan has already seen Republican politicians instructing poll workers to break the rules to catch their opponents committing fraud in the primary election this year. At least one county clerk is training poll workers that a threat of sabotage could come from the inside.

Election staffers know they are going to be feeling pressure. What they don’t yet know is whether they’ll be reporting up to someone who will defend them following the rules, or who is on the side of people claiming fraud. 

“As a local election official, if you don’t feel like you have support from the top it makes it very difficult to do your job,” said David Levine, elections integrity fellow at the non-profit Alliance for Securing Democracy and a former election official himself. 

Just under the surface of election denialism is the potential threat of political violence. In April of 2020 armed protesters stormed Michigan’s State Capitol in Lansing to protest pandemic lockdown measures. In October of that year, two-dozen people affiliated with local militias were charged in a plot to kidnap Governor Gretchen Whitmer. The 2020 election count proceeded peacefully but chaos broke out at one polling station in Detroit after the room reached capacity and officials turned away dozens of people trying to oversee ballot counting. A crowd of people then banged on windows chanting “let us in” and “stop the count.”

Having the person in charge of election integrity claiming fraud would have an enormous impact on the public’s trust in the system. But the impact on poll workers, and the decisions they make in trying to uphold election law could be just as important.

“It’s one thing to be feeling that heat from the outside,” said Levine. “If the arsonist is inside the firehouse you’ve got a whole different problem.”

Karamo has repeatedly alleged the 2020 presidential election was beset by rampant voter fraud. She argued a crime was conducted by the Democratic party, which is “taken over by a Satanic agenda,” and covered up by the media, which she called “the biggest enemy of the American people” who “need to be destroyed.” She accused Benson, the Democratic secretary of state, of being in on the scheme. She has often made sweeping claims of fraud without specifying exactly what she believes happened, though she did sign an affidavit after the 2020 election claiming she witnessed poll workers inputting false names and birthdays to validate ballots. 

“Our election cycle has been a robbery. It is an absolute robbery. We must stand up and fight back,” Karamo said in the days following Trump’s defeat to Biden. Her campaign did not respond to a request for comment. 

Fraud claims like Karamo’s have been comprehensively debunked. A string of legal challenges from the Trump campaign and its allies, including one Karamo swore an affidavit for, were shot down by the courts. The most famous example was the “Kraken” lawsuit from Sidney Powell and other pro Trump lawyers, named after the mythical creature due to its purported overwhelming force of evidence that would prove voter fraud in Michigan and across the country. The lawsuit turned out to be hundreds of pages of unfounded conspiracy theories and debunked fraud claims. The Republican-controlled state Senate spent months investigating the 2020 election and determined it was properly decided. The race also was not particularly close—Biden won by about 154,000 votes, almost fifteen times the margin by which Trump won the state in 2016.

“We have to recognize how divorced from reality those statements are,” said David Becker, founder of the Center for Election Innovation & Research and co-author of the book “The Big Truth.” Becker’s book argues that the 2020 election was the greatest success in the history of American democracy, handling the largest turnout and delivering verifiably accurate results during a global pandemic. 

“The election deniers have had multiple opportunities to support their claims in court, to submit their evidence to law enforcement, even to show the evidence to the targets of their grift… they have failed at every opportunity,” he told Bolts. 

Karamo’s campaign is nonetheless heavily centered on election security and investigating fraud claims. She is promising to halt the use of voting machines unless companies turn over their entire source code to the state, and beef up ballot security with technologies like infra-red, watermarks, fluorescent ink, and magnets. 

It is a sweeping platform with one major problem: Michigan law does not allow for the secretary of state to unilaterally make such changes. Shutting down voting machines, for example, would require an act of the legislature. 

Still, if elected Karamo would have the authority to order post-election audits, which she could use to target election workers at Democratic-heavy polling stations. Her investigation powers are limited to the administration of elections, though, and she could not prosecute. If she claims to unearth fraud, she would have to pass the matter on to the attorney general or a prosecutor, who would then choose whether to file charges. But Karamo is running alongside other election deniers who may complement her approach: Matthew DePerno, the current Republican candidate who is also a Trump-endorsed election denier who sued to overturn a county’s election results in 2020. And other subscribers to the Big Lie already hold key positions in local Michigan law enforcement. 

The prospect of large-scale coordination between an ecosystem of election deniers—the GOP nominee for governor has also said the last presidential race was stolen—would loom large over Michigan’s 2024 election and its aftermath.

Karamo would also have another major path to enact her platform: issuing directives to local clerks. Past secretaries have guided this power towards keeping the system uniform. A secretary who sees the system as corrupt could demand major changes that, intentionally or not, create wide variance in how votes are counted from county to county and town to town.

For example, a secretary, citing security concerns, could instruct clerks to apply strict new criteria to verifying identities. Voters with minor differences from their ID—say, having a beard in their driver’s license photo but not in person, or vice versa—could be ordered to cast a provisional ballot instead.

The law is silent on whether someone’s address on their ID needs to match with the current address on file. Many student IDs do not include addresses at all. A strict interpretation of the rules could mean many students or people who moved could be forced to cast provisional ballots. 

People who cast these ballots can show up days later with more ID to verify their identity, but this rarely actually happens according to Chris Thomas, who spent 36 years as Michigan’s director of elections working under both Democratic and Republican secretaries of state. “Of course nobody ever shows up. Who is going to trudge downtown to a clerk’s office?” he said.

The secretary is supposed to be a steady hand that enforces uniformity, said Thomas. But one who does not trust the system and tries to get thousands of poll workers to follow dramatic new instructions would likely result in variation and would almost certainly result in litigation. 

In 2021, a Republican small-town clerk broke with convention and refused to allow maintenance or perform required accuracy tests on voting machines. She said she did not trust the machines and wanted to preserve their data in case it showed voter fraud in the 2020 election. In that case, Benson took action and had the clerk removed from her duties. It is not hard to imagine Karamo going the other direction and siding with a local official refusing to follow the rules. 

“I would expect some very strange instructions to come out to election officials that are going to depart dramatically from how they do their business today. Then things get contentious, they get confusing,” said Thomas of an election-denier taking the reins. 

While Michigan’s election system is decentralized, one of its greatest strengths is that it is tied together by a top-down voter database run by the secretary of state. Unlike in most other states, this database is linked to the department of motor vehicles, meaning that when someone changes the address on their driver’s license it is automatically updated on voter rolls. This has resulted in a database that experts say is one of the cleanest and most accurate in all the country.

Karamo and others have argued the opposite, alleging that the Michigan voter rolls are littered with dead people. This is inaccurate, as death records are regularly run against the database to keep it up to date. If Karamo were to make some change to shake up the system, any changes that impact voter rolls would also affect the people who fill DMV offices daily for routine matters.

That, more than any high minded concerns about preserving democracy, may be the ultimate deterrent.

“You can piss people off a lot faster with what you do with the DMV compared to what you do with elections,” said Thomas.

The post Kristina Karamo Has Plans to Unwind Michigan Elections appeared first on Bolts.

Conservatives put their cards on the table sooner than expected. With Trump’s possible comeback bid still two years away, Republican members of Michigan’s State Board of Canvassers last week blocked two proposed constitutional amendments regarding abortion rights and voting rights. They flouted the usually-decisive recommendation of the state’s Bureau of Elections, which had determined that both measures received more than enough signatures to appear on the November ballot. 

The state Supreme Court intervened on Thursday in a pair of 5-2 decisions that will put both amendments on the Nov. 8 ballot. Michiganders will decide on that day whether to codify the right to access abortion in the state constitution and whether to expand ballot access by strengthening a slate of procedures like mail-in voting.

The rulings mark a failure for Michigan Republicans’ trial balloon for subverting future elections, whether the 2024 presidential race or the midterms. Once again, GOP canvassers weaponized their role in the long chain of custody over election processes, and this time they stayed unified long enough to halt routine procedures. But a majority on the high court did not blink, signaling that they are willing to act as a backstop—and could again in the future.

“It was dangerous for democracy when Canvassers in Michigan said they would refuse to certify the election results in 2020,” Josh Douglas, a University of Kentucky professor specialized in election law, told Bolts. “The Michigan Supreme Court’s decision on both of these initiatives show that refusing to put these issues on the ballot was the same kind of overreach.”

For Leah Litman, a professor of law at the University of Michigan, the sequence of events at least establishes a precedent for how the state’s high court could intervene after the 2022 or 2024 elections if GOP canvassers similarly attempt to block results. 

But that road map would only work “if the court stays the same,” she added. 

Two justices on the Michigan Supreme Court are running for re-election in November—Democrat Richard Bernstein, who voted with the majority on Thursday, and Republican Brian Zahra, one of the dissenters. The GOP would flip the seven-member court if it sweeps both seats. On the one hand, that would not have been enough to change Thursday’s rulings since Republican Elizabeth Clement voted with the four Democrats.

Still, the two rulings were handed down almost along party lines and Clement did not write an opinion in either, leaving some uncertainty over how a higher-profile partisan confrontation over a presidential election would unfold.

Since Thursday’s rulings, Justice Bridget McCormack, a Democrat who was part of the majority in both rulings and whose term was meant to last through 2029, announced she will leave the court by the end of this year. Democratic Governor Gretchen Whitmer will appoint her replacement, who will need to face voters in November 2024. The next two years could also bring an unforeseen vacancy on the court, which would be filled by whomever wins November’s governor’s race between Whitmer and Republican Tudor Dixon, who is endorsed by Trump and has falsely said the 2020 election was stolen.

The justices traded unusually acrimonious barbs in their rulings on Thursday, testifying to a polarized court. Earlier this summer, when the Michigan Supreme Court issued a landmark series of rulings that expanded protections for youth against extreme sentences, most were issued on 4-3 party-line votes. Much as he did on Thursday, Zahra was the most caustic of the dissenters.

The latest dispute about the State Board of Canvassers centered on whether they have authority in elections beyond simply aggregating and affirming the analyses and results  counted by others.

The GOP canvassers claimed that their rejection of the abortion rights referendum, which would effectively overturn a pre-Roe abortion ban that is currently enjoined by courts, was based on a typographical error on the ballot petitions that reduced spacing between some words. Proponents of the amendment, who had collected a record number of signatures to put it on the ballot, rebuffed that argument on the merits. But they also responded that it’s not up to the state canvassers to adjudicate such questions and that the board exists as a ministerial body.

The exchange echoes the aftermath of the 2020 election, when Trump allies pressured Michigan’s county and state canvassers to investigate the results transmitted to them by lower boards—rather than fulfill their usual role of effectively just adding up tallies. Attacked by Trump’s allies, one Republican member of the Wayne County Board of Canvassers who certified the results said at the time, “The only thing that the Board of Canvassers has the authority to do is to compare the statement of voters, the number of ballots that were received versus the number of ballots that were tallied and to make any mathematical corrections.” 

Mari Manoogian, a Democratic state Representative who represents Michigan’s Oakland County in the legislature, testified in front of the State Board of Canvassers in November 2020, telling them they were overstepping their role in acting as though they could ignore election results. “To me, this is a very similar situation,” she told Bolts this week about the initiatives. 

“The State Board of Canvassers really had a ministerial duty to certify both petitions, and they didn’t follow through with their duties,” she said. “I’m deeply concerned with their unwillingness to do their jobs and their propensity toward caving to partisanship regarding the certification of elections and regarding the certification of valid proposals. It’s a dangerous, slippery slope.”

Chief Justice Bridget McCormack, writing for the majority on Thursday, echoed this assessment of the two Republican state canvassers. “They would disenfranchise millions of Michiganders not because they believe the many thousands of Michiganders who signed the proposal were confused by it, but because they think they have identified a technicality that allows them to do so, a game of gotcha gone very bad,” she wrote in the decision on the abortion ruling. “What a sad marker of the times.”

The court’s rapid intervention this week could assuage some of the uncertainty that would be sure to follow if county or state Republican canvassers refuse to certify Michigan results in 2024 and help stem the chaos. Trump allies hope to sow confusion as a strategy to justify extraordinary measures, like having lawmakers step in.  

And in two years justices could find it even easier to step in. One of two ballot measures the Republican state canvassers tried to block last week is worded to constrain their ability to thwart future elections. The voting rights amendment contains a section that would enshrine in the state constitution that it is the “ministerial, clerical, nondiscretionary” duty of county and state canvassers to certify election results by doing no more than aggregating the statement of votes shared by lower counting boards.  

Douglas told Bolts that, if voters approve the amendment in November, it could add a layer of protection by giving state courts additional language to cite to force canvassers to honor election results. “I think that this is one of those situations where the duty exists already but that it’s not harmful to lay it out so it’s abundantly clear,” Douglas said. “I think that makes it even clearer to the canvassers that they can’t choose not to certify. It gives them much less wiggle room to try to justify their actions.”

Litman stressed, though, that doubling down on legal standards would not dissuade people who are willing to go rogue—especially if they have already signaled they are eager to do so.

“The reality is that under existing law the board was already supposed to have clerical and ministerial duties,” Litman said. “And yet the board tried to prevent this ballot initiative as well as [the] reproductive freedom ballot initiative from getting on the ballot. So I don’t know if… the GOP members of the board will abide by the law any more going forward.” She added, “maybe after this case and this initiative they will.”

The article was updated on Sept. 12 with news of Bridget McCormack’s retirement.

The post Michigan Republicans Stumble in Dress Rehearsal for Overturning Future Elections appeared first on Bolts.