All posts tagged "Electionadministration"

State and local election officials across the country have begun pursuing strategies to combat election lies ahead of the 2024 presidential election: They’re meeting with community organizations, posting social media videos and even inviting skeptics to visit election offices in efforts to “pre-bunk” falsehoods they know are coming. The threat, officials said, has not gone away since former President Donald Trump and his allies falsely claimed the 2020 presidential election was rigged and tainted by widespread voter fraud. The next presidential election is more than a year away, but it’s never......

With their eyes on the 2024 presidential election, state lawmakers around the country are preparing to reshape voting rules in what election experts expect will be another busy legislative season. Republican lawmakers — many of whom are motivated by the mistaken belief that the voting system is riddled with election fraud — are looking to tighten rules around absentee voting and give state officials more powers to prosecute election discrepancies. Meanwhile, Democrats will try to expand access to the ballot box through early voting, new voting rights for people with former felony convictions a......

In 2020, ballot drop boxes were a sturdy, metallic symbol of increased voter access amid a pandemic. Absentee and mail voting surged across the country, and voters used drop boxes to return 41% of those ballots. Two years later, they’ve become a symbol of the attacks on voter access. After 2020, right-wing activists scrutinized security footage of drop boxes but failed to turn up evidence of widespread voter fraud. States across the country told the Associated Press there were no cases of fraud, vandalism or theft involving drop boxes that could have affected election outcomes. But the campaig......

The pervasive myths of a stolen 2020 presidential election and widespread voter fraud are still dominant in many state legislatures, as Republican policymakers call for more investigations and reshape election administration in a way that could give them a partisan advantage. In Georgia, the Republican-led State Election Board could use a new state law to install partisan officials on county election boards in Democratic-leaning areas, giving them the power to decide which ballots to reject or even overturn results. Voting rights advocates in Wisconsin worry the GOP-led state legislature is ra......

LANSING, Mich. — Republican Party leaders across the battleground state of Michigan have quietly worked in recent weeks to replace incumbent county election officials with newcomers, some of whom have sought to undermine the public's faith in the 2020 vote. The trend focuses on four-member county canvassing boards, the bipartisan panels in charge of verifying records and importantly, certifying results. It comes in the midst of an internal party struggle over whether to accept Democratic President Joe Biden's win last year. On Nov. 1, two members of each board — one Republican and one Democrat......

During the waning days of the presidential election, Vermont Democratic state Sen. Cheryl Hooker got a desperate call from one of her constituents: The woman said she had forgotten to sign her name on the absentee ballot, it had been rejected by the town clerk, and she couldn’t fix it. This was a familiar story around the country, as the pandemic forced voters and election administrators to take a crash course in mail-in voting. “People make mistakes,” said Hooker, who couldn’t help her constituent at the time. “They don’t sign the outside envelope, or they forget to put their name on it. Thei......