President-elect Donald Trump may have quieted his lies about widespread voter fraud after his win last month, but the impact of his effort to cast doubt on the integrity of American elections lingers on.

Although this post-election period has been markedly calmer than the aftermath of the 2020 presidential election, there were isolated flare-ups of Republican candidates borrowing a page from Trump’s playbook to claim that unsatisfactory election results were illegitimate.

In Wisconsin, Republican U.S. Senate challenger Eric Hovde spread unsubstantiated rumors about “last-minute” absentee ballots in Milwaukee that he said flipped the outcome of the race. Though he conceded to incumbent Democratic U.S. Sen. Tammy Baldwin nearly two weeks after the election, his rhetoric helped stoke a spike in online conspiracy theories. The Milwaukee Election Commission disputed his claims, saying they “lack any merit.”

In North Carolina, Republican state Senate leader Phil Berger told reporters last week he feared that the vote-counting process for a state Supreme Court seat was rigged for Democrats. Karen Brinson Bell, the head of the State Board of Elections, skewered Berger for his comments, saying they could inspire violence.

And in Arizona, Republican U.S. Senate candidate Kari Lake, who has spent two years disputing her defeat in the 2022 governor’s race, hasn’t acknowledged her Senate loss. While she thanked her supporters in a video posted to X, the platform formerly called Twitter, she stopped short of conceding to Democratic U.S. Rep. Ruben Gallego.

After a bruising 4 years, a hope for normalcy in American elections

Republicans’ disinformation campaigns have caused Americans’ confidence in elections to plummet and exposed local election officials to threats and harassment, and some observers worry about a return of the GOP’s destructive rhetoric the next time they lose.

“We have to turn this rhetoric down,” said Jay Young, senior director of voting and democracy for Common Cause, a voting rights group. “There cannot be this continued attack on this institution.”

Still, many politicians who either denied the 2020 election results or criticized their local voting processes won election. In Arizona, for example, voters chose state Rep. Justin Heap, a Republican, to lead the election office in Maricopa County, home to Phoenix and the largest jurisdiction in the critical swing state. Heap ran on a “voter confidence” platform and suggested at a Trump rally that Maricopa’s election office is a “national laughingstock.”

Trump tapped former Florida Attorney General Pam Bondi to oversee the U.S. Department of Justice. Bondi, a Republican, served as an attorney for Trump while he disputed the results in 2020. She could use her position as U.S. attorney general to prosecute election officials involved in that election, as Trump promised in an X post in September.

While the rhetoric around stolen elections has been somewhat muted among the GOP ranks since Trump’s victory, conservatives attempted to flip the “election denial” script on Democrats in at least one race.

In Pennsylvania, Democratic U.S. Sen. Bob Casey refused to concede defeat until last Thursday, two weeks after The Associated Press called the race for Republican challenger David McCormick. Casey lost by fewer than 16,000 votes, less than half a percentage point.

Casey said he wanted to see the results of an automatic recount and various court cases filed on his behalf, but Republicans jumped on his refusal to bow out quickly.

Bob Casey concedes in Pennsylvania’s U.S. Senate race

Last week, Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, a Republican who resisted pressure from Trump in 2020 to “find” votes after he lost the state, lambasted Casey for not conceding the Senate race.

But Kathy Boockvar, president of Athena Strategies and former Pennsylvania secretary of the commonwealth told the Capital-Star that comparisons between what the Casey campaign was doing and Republicans’ efforts to overturn results in the 2020 election were not valid; under Pennsylvania law, a recount is automatically triggered when the margin of votes is under 0.5%, as it was in the Casey-McCormick race.

She added that the practice of “calling” elections has “done more damage to perceptions of elections than a lot of other things, because people think that when the Associated Press calls an election or Decision Desk calls an election, that that has any official relevance, and it has none,” she said. “The Associated Press and others ‘calling’ of elections exist solely for the purpose of feeding people’s need for quick answers to a process that is not designed to be quick for good reasons.”

Even as Republicans mostly toned down their rhetoric this year, some left-wing social media accounts repeated a debunked conspiracy theory that Starlink, the internet provider owned by billionaire and Trump supporter Elon Musk, changed vote counts.

Those posts, however, aren’t comparable to GOP election denialism, according to the University of Washington’s Center for an Informed Public, which fights strategic misinformation.

“While the claims are similar, the rumoring dynamics on the left are markedly different due to the lack of endorsement or amplification by left-leaning influencers, candidates, or party elites,” the center posted last week.

Young, of Common Cause, said it’s clear that election disinformation of any kind has a devastating impact on the local officials tasked with administering the vote.

Threats to election workers continued even after Election Day. Bomb threats were called into election offices in California, Minnesota, Oregon and other states, forcing evacuations as workers were tallying ballots.

But this was just a slice of the onslaught many officials faced over the past four years. Local election officials need the resources to beef up the way they fight disinformation and physical attacks, Young said.

“We should be doing better by them,” he said.

Kim Lyons of the Capital-Star staff contributed.

Stateline is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Stateline maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Scott S. Greenberger for questions: info@stateline.org. Follow Stateline on Facebook and X.

Pennsylvania Capital-Star is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Pennsylvania Capital-Star maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Kim Lyons for questions: info@penncapital-star.com. Follow Pennsylvania Capital-Star on Facebook and X.

Preventing people who are not United States citizens from casting a ballot has reemerged as a focal point in the ongoing Republican drive to safeguard “election integrity,” even though noncitizens are rarely involved in voter fraud.

Ahead of November’s presidential election, congressional and state Republican lawmakers are aiming to keep noncitizens away from the polls. They’re using state constitutional amendments and new laws that require citizenship verification to vote. Noncitizens can vote in a handful of local elections in several states, but already are not allowed to vote in statewide or federal elections.

Some Republicans argue that preventing noncitizens from casting ballots — long a boogeyman in conservative politics — reduces the risk of fraud and increases confidence in American democracy. But even some on the right think these efforts are going too far, as they churn up anti-immigration sentiment and unsupported fears of widespread fraud, all to boost turnout among the GOP base.

While Republican congressional leaders want to require documentation proving U.S. citizenship when registering to vote in federal elections, voters in at least four states will decide on ballot measures in November that would amend their state constitutions to clarify that only U.S. citizens can vote in state and local elections.

Over the past six years, Alabama, Colorado, Florida, Louisiana, North Dakota and Ohio have all amended their state constitutions.

In Kentucky — which along with Idaho, Iowa and Wisconsin is now considering a constitutional amendment — noncitizens voting will not be tolerated, said Republican state Sen. Damon Thayer, who voted in February to put the amendment on November’s ballot. Five Democrats between the two chambers backed the Republican-authored legislation, while 16 others dissented.

“There is a lot of concern here about the Biden administration’s open border policies,” Thayer, the majority floor leader, told Stateline. “People see it on the news every day, with groups of illegals pouring through the border. And they’re combined with concerns on election integrity.”

U.S. House Speaker Mike Johnson expressed similar concerns last month when he announced new legislation — despite an existing 1996 ban — that would make it illegal for noncitizens to vote in federal elections. During a trip to Florida to meet with former President Donald Trump, the Louisiana Republican said it’s common sense to require proof of citizenship.

Republicans scrutinize voting rolls and ramp up for mass challenges ahead of election

“It could, if there are enough votes, affect the presidential election,” he said, standing in front of Trump in the presumptive presidential nominee’s Mar-a-Lago resort. “We cannot wait for widespread fraud to occur, especially when the threat of fraud is growing with every single illegal immigrant that crosses that border.”

That rhetoric is rooted in a fear about how the U.S. is changing demographically, becoming more diverse as the non-white population increases, said longtime Republican strategist Mike Madrid. Though this political strategy has worked to galvanize support among GOP voters in the past, he questions whether this will be effective politically in the long term.

“There’s no problem being solved here,” said Madrid, whose forthcoming book, “The Latino Century,” outlines the group’s growing voter participation. “This is all politics. It’s all about stoking fears and angering the base.”

Noncitizens are voting in some elections around the country, but not in a way that many might think.

Where noncitizens vote

In 16 cities and towns in California, Maryland and Vermont (along with the District of Columbia), noncitizens are allowed to vote in some local elections, such as for school board or city council. Voters in Santa Ana, California, will decide in November whether to allow noncitizens to vote in citywide elections.

In 2022, New York’s State Supreme Court struck down New York City’s 2021 ordinance that allowed noncitizens to vote in local elections, ruling it violated the state constitution. Proponents have argued that people, regardless of citizenship status, should be able to vote on local issues affecting their children and community.

During the first 150 years of the U.S., 40 states at various times permitted noncitizens to vote in elections. That came to a halt in the 1920s when nativism ramped up and states began making voting a privilege for only U.S. citizens.

The number of noncitizen voters has been relatively small, and those voters are never allowed to participate in statewide or national elections. Local election officials maintain separate voter lists to keep noncitizens out of statewide databases.

In Vermont’s local elections in March, 62 noncitizens voted in Burlington, 13 voted in Montpelier and 11 voted in Winooski, all accounting for a fraction of the total votes.

In Takoma Park, Maryland, of the 347 noncitizens who were registered to vote in 2017, just 72 cast a ballot, according to the latest data provided by the city. And in San Francisco, 36 noncitizens registered to vote in 2020 and 31 voted.

Voter turnout among noncitizens is low for two reasons, said Ron Hayduk, a professor of political science at San Francisco State University, who is one of the leading scholars in this area. Many noncitizens in these jurisdictions do not realize they have the right to vote, and many are afraid of deportation or legal issues, he said.

Registration forms in jurisdictions that allow noncitizens to vote in local elections do acknowledge the risks. In San Francisco, local election officials warn that the federal Immigration and Customs Enforcement or other agencies could gain access to the city’s registration lists and advise residents to consult an immigration attorney before registering to vote.

“Immigrants were very excited about this new right to vote, they wanted to vote, but many of them did not ultimately register and vote because they were concerned,” Hayduk said.

While there are some noncitizens participating in a handful of local elections, they’re not participating illegally in any substantial way in state and national elections.

Though there’s room for legitimate debate about whether noncitizens should be allowed to vote at the local level, there is no widespread voter fraud among noncitizens nationally, said Walter Olson, a senior fellow at the Cato Institute, a libertarian think tank.

In 2020, federal investigators charged 19 noncitizens for voting in North Carolina elections. A national database run by The Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank, shows that there have been fewer than 100 cases of voter fraud tied to noncitizens since 2002, according to a recent count by The Washington Post.

Noncitizens Are Slowly Gaining Voting Rights

Trump continues to falsely assert that he was the rightful winner of the 2020 presidential election and that he had more of the popular vote in 2016. He has claimed without evidence that voter fraud was to blame, including in part from noncitizens.

With illegal immigration near the top of major issues for voters ahead of November, Trump and his movement sense they have momentum with the public to tie immigration concerns with their continued election claims, Olson said.

It’s a way of keeping Democrats on the back foot, by falsely accusing them of allowing immigrants to come into the country illegally so they can vote, he added.

“The imaginings that there is some sort of plot by an entire major political party is just remarkably evidence-free,” he said.

Fighting ‘the left’

Although voter fraud among noncitizens is not happening widely, states should still add protections to their voting systems to prevent that possibility, said Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, a Republican.

Raffensperger has been a major proponent of a Peach State law that requires documentation to verify the citizenship status of voters. In 2022, he announced that an internal audit of Georgia’s voter rolls over the past 25 years found that 1,634 noncitizens had attempted to register to vote, but not a single one cast a ballot.

“I will continue to fight the left on this issue so that only American citizens decide American elections,” Raffensperger wrote in a statement to Stateline.

Meanwhile, lawmakers in Missouri, North Carolina, South Carolina and West Virginia are actively considering legislation that would add ballot initiatives for November to prevent noncitizen voting. Those bills are at various points in the legislative process, with many having already passed one chamber.

During a committee hearing last week, Republican Missouri state Sen. Ben Brown said the state’s constitutional language is vague enough to allow cities to let noncitizens vote. While presenting his bill, he cited California’s parallel constitutional wording and how cities such as Oakland and San Francisco allow noncitizens to vote in local elections.

Most state constitutions have similar language around voter eligibility, saying that “every” U.S. citizen that is 18 or over can vote. The proposed amendments usually would change one word, emphasizing that “only” U.S. citizens can vote, eliminating an ambiguity in the text that has left room for cities in several states to allow noncitizen participation in elections.

It’s a “pretty simple” fix, said Jack Tomczak, vice president of outreach for Americans for Citizen Voting, a group that works with state lawmakers to amend their constitutions so that only citizens can vote in state and local elections.

“It does dilute the voice of citizens of this country,” Tomczak said. “And it also dilutes the nature of citizenship.”

Stateline is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Stateline maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Scott S. Greenberger for questions: info@stateline.org. Follow Stateline on Facebook and Twitter.

When Scott Hoen ran to be Carson City, Nevada’s chief election official two years ago, he campaigned on “election integrity,” promising to make sure voter registration lists were accurate.

In the chaotic aftermath of the 2020 presidential election, he believed that too many of his fellow Republicans were convinced that there was widespread voter fraud. By keeping voter rolls current, Hoen thought he could restore voter trust in his county’s election system.

He won. And every day since he took office, he and his staff have tried to keep that focus, using data from all levels of government to remove voters who have moved or died from the active voter list.

Hoen was surprised, then, to be named in a lawsuit the Republican National Committee and the Nevada Republican Party filed last month against him, four other Nevada county clerks and the secretary of state. The lawsuit alleges that five localities had “inordinately high” voter registration rates, and that the state is violating federal law by not having what are known as “clean” voter rolls.

Hoen said the lawsuit is “unfortunate” and “a distraction” in a pivotal election year. The state responded by saying the data Republicans used in the lawsuit are “highly flawed” and that the RNC’s analysis was like “comparing apples to orangutans.” Former President Donald Trump’s lawyers asserted without evidence that more than 1,500 dead Nevadans voted in 2020 and that an additional 42,000 in the state voted twice.

The Nevada lawsuit is just one example of the tactics Republicans and conservative activists are using ahead of November’s presidential election, as they seek to purge voter rolls of allegedly ineligible voters. The efforts have election experts worried about voter access.

Changing a voter’s status is routine for election officials. Like others across the country, Hoen moves voters from active to inactive when election mail is repeatedly returned or when he gets death notices, and moves them to active status when he gets motor vehicle records for newly registered voters.

Why Republican-led states keep leaving a group that verifies voter rolls

Nevada also is a member of the Electronic Registration Information Center, known commonly as ERIC, an interstate data-sharing pact that seeks to help states keep updated voter lists. Recently, ERIC has been a target of conspiracy theories that led to an exodus of nine Republican-led states over the past two years.

“Who knows where they got their numbers. But they didn’t consult me or ask me, or no one’s talked to me about what we do with voter roll maintenance,” Hoen said of the lawsuit in an interview with Stateline. “We do everything we can, per the law, to keep our voter rolls as plain as possible.”

The RNC filed a similar lawsuit against Michigan last month. Conservative groups have recently filed lawsuits in many other states, seeking access to state voter registration lists and claiming they might be bloated.

Some states, including Georgia and Indiana, have made it easier to remove registered voters from the rolls. And Trump-aligned groups have launched data analysis tools to aid in large-scale challenges to voter registrations.

Election experts say maintaining accurate voter lists is a key part of election administration, but they are concerned that the challenges and lawsuits could bolster unfounded claims of rampant voter fraud. They also worry it could create undue hardships on voters who may have to prove their eligibility close to an election, and bog down election offices with frivolous data requests and challenges.

“When you see efforts to do mass challenges in the midst of the presidential primaries and months before a major election, you’ve got to wonder whether the intent is to create chaos and confusion amongst voters rather than legitimate list maintenance,” said David Becker, founder and executive director of the Center for Election Innovation & Research, a nonpartisan organization that advises local election officials nationwide.

Voter challenges aren’t inherently bad, he said. There are legitimate reasons to bring a challenge: A neighbor may have died or moved away, for example, and a voter wants to let an election official know.

But Becker is concerned that mass challenges and lawsuits could make voter lists less accurate, which could lead to problems at polling places, more provisional ballots and longer lines — creating the conditions for candidates to claim an election was stolen.

Mass voter challenges

Georgia enacted a law in 2021 that allows residents to make unlimited challenges to voter registrations, and requires local election officials to respond to those challenges within 10 business days. Thousands of registrations were challenged, and local election officials raced frantically to check the data and send responses.

The next year, 10 election staffers in Gwinnett County, Georgia, worked more than 40 days straight to handle 47,000 challenges in the midterm election, said Zach Manifold, the county elections supervisor. Fair Fight, a local voting rights group, said data showed those challenges disproportionately targeted people of color and younger voters.

The county’s voter roll is “a living and breathing document,” Manifold said. His office processes thousands of routine changes weekly. In addition to regular updates at the county level and being a member of ERIC, Georgia conducts large-scale list maintenance on odd years.

While a federal judge ruled in January that mass challenges in Georgia are not illegal intimidation, he did emphasize that the list of potentially ineligible voters that conservative activists compiled to contest registrations “utterly lacked reliability” that “verges on recklessness.”

A scenario similar to 2022’s mass challenges may repeat itself this year.

In face of threats, election workers vow: ‘You are not disrupting the democratic process’

Last month, the Republican-led Georgia legislature passed a bill that would more clearly define existing law by setting standards for probable cause to challenge voters and for how much evidence is needed for a successful challenge. It also would cut off registration removals within 45 days of an election.

Some Democrats worried the change would lead to a rush of challenges, hurting voters. But Republican state Sen. Max Burns, one of the sponsors of the bill, said during a March committee hearing that the legislation may lead to fewer challenges.

“I think we need to clean up our voter rolls, so that people have confidence that those who are on the voter rolls are legitimate,” Burns said.

Republican Gov. Brian Kemp, who also is Georgia’s former secretary of state, has until early May to sign the legislation. His office told Stateline there will be a thorough review process.

Last month, Indiana Republican Gov. Eric Holcomb signed into law a bill that makes it easier to remove voters from the rolls by requiring state officials to compare voter registration lists with motor vehicle lists for noncitizens. People who are flagged would have 30 days to prove their citizenship.

The New Hampshire House also passed a bill that would allow voter registration challenges on Election Day. The measure is sitting in a state Senate committee.

To assist with those challenges, several right-wing groups that claim American elections are rigged because of voter fraud are releasing voter list tools that activists can use to scour voter registrations.

A company called EagleAI developed a tool to scan Georgia’s voter registration records. There are similar efforts in Nevada and Michigan, all coordinated through the Election Integrity Network, which is run by former Trump campaign attorney Cleta Mitchell. The network did not respond to an interview request.

“They’re perpetuating these lies that our voter rolls are full of fraudulent voters and bloated,” said Kristin Nabers, Georgia state director for All Voting is Local Action, a voting rights group that has opposed mass challenges in the Peach State. “The burden on election offices is really considerable.”

More lawsuits

Challenges to registrations are getting an assist from court cases that are making voter rolls public.

Since 2020, there have “been a lot of questions” surrounding elections, said Lauren Bowman Bis, director of communications and engagement for the Public Interest Legal Foundation, one of several conservative groups that have sued states to release voter registration lists.

Transparency in elections is crucial for people to have more confidence in the system, she added. By gaining access to voter names, addresses and party registration, groups like Bis’ can check states to make sure lists are accurate and they’re not sending multiple ballots to people or are ensuring dead people are removed from the rolls.

Bis has gone to cemeteries in Michigan where, she said, she has seen the names of active voters on tombstones.

The foundation, often known as PILF, has active lawsuits in Hawaii, Michigan and South Carolina over their voter roll maintenance. Over the past four years, they have successfully sued Illinois and Maryland and gained access to those states’ voter lists.

In February, a federal appeals court ruled that Maine had to release its voter rolls to the Public Interest Legal Foundation. The group has appealed a ruling in Michigan that it lost in a district court last month, arguing the state did not make a “reasonable effort” to clean its rolls.

Another conservative group that posts voter rolls online, the Voter Reference Foundation, sued Pennsylvania in February over access to its registration lists. The group did not respond to emailed questions.

“The voter roll really is the most essential election integrity document,” said Bis. “We’re just trying to make sure that federal law is enforced in states or localities where we find election officials aren’t doing what they are required to by law to have a secure election that people can have confidence in the results.”

Election Deniers Already Are Disrupting the Midterm Election

But the disagreement over these efforts once again comes down to the data — the methodology that plaintiffs use in their complaints.

Conservative groups sometimes compare the current number of registered voters to an outdated estimate of the number of voting-age citizens in that jurisdiction, said Eliza Sweren-Becker, a senior counsel at the Brennan Center for Justice, a voting rights group housed at the New York University School of Law.

“You’re really comparing apples and oranges in suggesting that there’s something improper with high voter registration rates,” she said. “We should hope and expect that all eligible Americans who want to participate in our democratic system are registered to vote and can stay on the rolls.”

Some Republicans are concerned too.

Dennis Lennox, a Michigan-based Republican political consultant, told Stateline that while he does not agree with the way that many Democratic state officials changed voting rules in recent years, he worries that some Republicans are more focused on lawsuits and curbing ballot access than adapting to new early voting realities to get out the vote in a bigger way.

“Republicans, by and large, have been caught flat-footed,” Lennox wrote in an email. “The party nationally and in many states is basically divided between those wanting to focus on so-called lawfare and those willing to adapt and accept the reality of campaigns and elections in 2024.”

Stateline is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Stateline maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Scott S. Greenberger for questions: info@stateline.org. Follow Stateline on Facebook and Twitter.

When it comes to voting by mail, Utah is not your typical deep red state.

In 2020, when many states scrambled to implement mail-in voting so voters had a safe way to cast a ballot during the pandemic, Utah already had a system.

Republican conspiracy theories questioning the integrity of voting by mail in the tumultuous aftermath of the 2020 election never rang true for most Utahns. They’d been testing the system for years and found it trustworthy and convenient.

In Utah, that appreciation has stuck in the four years since, despite several legislative attempts by Republicans to curb residents’ access to mail-in ballots.

Again this year, members of the Republican supermajority in Salt Lake City joined Democrats in rejecting attempts to curb the state’s universal vote-by-mail system. The failed bills would have added a new deadline for turning in ballots and required voters to request mail-in ballots rather than having them sent automatically.

There’s a different story playing out nationally. Former President Donald Trump, the presumptive 2024 Republican nominee, has — without evidence — lambasted the voting process as being rife with fraud and has blamed it for rigging elections for his opponents. Republican lawmakers around the country have listened to him.

Republican-led states have restricted access to voting by mail through tighter deadlines, limiting who can request a mail-in ballot and eliminating drop boxes. Utah, though, continues to back its approach to ballot access, as bipartisan opponents turned aside efforts to restrict mail-in voting.

As ranked choice voting gains momentum, parties in power push back

The mistrust of an unfamiliar voting method that dominated other red states’ politics never landed fully in Utah, said TJ Ellerbeck, executive director of the Rural Utah Project, a group that advocates for Native American and rural voters.

“Most average voters in Utah don’t think that there’s anything wrong that needs to be fixed,” Ellerbeck said. “The ideas that are put forth by a handful of legislators in states across the country just really don’t reflect what people actually think about our voting system.”

Some of the Republican lawmakers behind proposed mail-voting restrictions in Utah concede that point, even as they try to navigate the prevailing mood in their party. In order to restore confidence in elections, the argument goes, voting rules must be tightened.

Republican state Rep. Norm Thurston, for example, proposed a measure that would have required that mailed ballots get to county clerks on Election Day, instead of merely being postmarked by Election Day. That would have cut into potential voters’ time to make their decisions and added uncertainty in rural areas with slower mail service.

“In Utah, I don’t know that we have a particular problem,” Thurston said in an interview.

“But one of my concerns is making sure that our voters have confidence that our voting process is not flawed or vulnerable,” he said. “We want people to know our process is solid and that people can have trust in how things are going to turn out.”

In Utah, though, voter confidence is high.

According to a January poll commissioned by the Sutherland Institute, a Utah-based conservative think tank, 76% of likely 2024 voters in the state think the vote-by-mail process produces fair outcomes.

“There’s a political momentum on the Republican side to put more restrictions on it,” said Derek Monson, chief growth officer at the Sutherland Institute. “But it’s up against this experiential reality that people like it, they’re familiar with it, they’re confident in it.”

In the large, rural state, whose southeastern end includes a slice of the Navajo Nation, voting by mail allows remote voters who may be hours from a polling place to conveniently cast their ballots. Even before the pandemic, Utah was one of four states (Colorado, Hawaii and Oregon were the others) where nearly all voters used mail-in ballots, keeping only a handful of vote centers open for people to drop them off in person. Today, Utah is the sole Republican state among the eight states (plus the District of Columbia) that send mail-in ballots to every voter.

“We have a very vibrant voting system in Utah,” said Katharine Biele, president of the League of Women Voters of Utah. “We have been able to prove that we are a model for the nation on mailed ballots.”

So far, Utah has resisted attempts at making major changes to its vote-by-mail system. But voting rights advocates are not breathing easy.

“Utah is not immune,” said Ellerbeck. “It’s a fight we’re winning, but we haven’t won.”

Why Republican-led states keep leaving a group that verifies voter rolls

There are some members of the legislature who, like Thurston, want to add limits in the name of improving accuracy and integrity of elections. Utah wouldn’t be alone among states that have tighter rules around voting by mail, even in states led by Democrats.

He got the idea for his legislation, he said, during a National Conference of State Legislatures summit. There, he heard that blue Colorado, which also has a vote-by-mail system, requires that ballots be received by county clerks by 7 p.m. on Election Day.

“We were trying to figure out if there is a way that we can accelerate the finalization of the election with the goal of giving more people confidence that our election processes is safe,” said Thurston, who added that he returns his ballot early through a drop box, not trusting the mail.

Hundreds of supporters of voting by mail showed up at the committee hearing for his bill in January; they argued that a change in long-standing procedure could confuse and potentially disenfranchise voters who have slow mail in rural areas.

After the bill was held in committee by a unanimous vote, including by Thurston, committee leaders didn’t take up another bill that would have limited voting by mail.

Thurston said he understood the concerns local election officials and voters voiced about changing deadlines, acknowledging that it might require a “massive” voter awareness campaign, which could be expensive and difficult.

Similar objections were raised in 2022, when one Republican lawmaker attempted to scrap the state’s vote-by-mail system and return to in-person voting. That bill also failed to advance out of committee, with several Republicans joining Democrats to defeat it.

Voting by mail remains at risk in many other states.

Last month, the Republican-led Arizona House passed a bill that would limit mail-in voting to people with disabilities, military members and older people, with limited exceptions for people temporarily out of the state. The bill is awaiting a committee hearing in the state Senate.

Meanwhile, at least two dozen other states are exploring further limits this year, though few if any have been signed into law. Last year, 14 states enacted 17 restrictive voting laws that included banning ballot drop boxes, requiring more information to receive mail-in ballots and shortening deadlines for turning in absentee ballots, according to the Brennan Center for Justice, a New York-based voting rights advocacy organization.

Feds deliver stark warnings to state election officials ahead of November

Even in Utah, new hurdles to voting have emerged in recent years.

In 2022, Republican Gov. Spencer Cox signed into law a measure that requires 24-hour video surveillance of ballot drop boxes. Voting rights advocates opposed the bill, arguing it would limit some locations for drop boxes in heavily rural areas, especially on the Navajo Nation, where there is sporadic electricity, said Ellerbeck, of the Rural Utah Project.

And in Utah County, the second most populous in the state, County Clerk Aaron Davidson, a Republican, decided the county would no longer pay postage for mail-in ballots.

The move aims to encourage voters to use ballot drop boxes, instead of relying on the mail. It will also save the county $110,000 a year, he said. Nineteen Utah counties don’t provide postage for mail-in ballots, Davidson pointed out, while 10 others do, including Salt Lake County, home to more than a third of Utahns.

Davidson made the announcement while speaking in favor of Thurston’s legislation during the committee hearing in January. He told Stateline, though, that he had softened his position on mail-in ballot deadlines after hearing testimony from clerks in smaller, more rural counties who worried delays in the mail could make it harder to make an Election Day deadline.

“Society has just got more complex, and people need that ability to vote by mail,” Davidson said. “But I do believe it needs some more restrictions.”

Stateline is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Stateline maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Scott S. Greenberger for questions: info@stateline.org. Follow Stateline on Facebook and Twitter.

WASHINGTON — Federal law enforcement and cybersecurity officials are warning the nation’s state election administrators that they face serious threats ahead of November’s presidential election.

Secretaries of state and state election directors must be ready for potential cyberattacks, both familiar and uncomfortably new, according to the feds. And they must remain vigilant about possible threats to their personal safety.

Voter databases could be targeted this year through phishing or ransomware attacks, election officials were told. Bad actors — both foreign and domestic — are trying to erode confidence in the integrity of elections through dis- and misinformation, and advancements in artificial intelligence present unprecedented challenges to democracy.

“The threat environment, unfortunately, is very high,” said Tim Langan, executive assistant director for the Criminal, Cyber, Response, and Services Branch of the FBI, speaking last week at the winter conference of the National Association of Secretaries of State in Washington. “It is extremely alarming.”

Kentucky Republican Secretary of State Michael Adams knows this all too well.

Hours after he was sworn in for his second term early last month, there was a bomb threat at the state capitol in Frankfort. An email sent to several state government offices, including Adams’, said that the bombs placed at the capitol would “make sure you all end up dead.” Eight other state capitols received similar threats, but no bombs were found.

In face of threats, election workers vow: ‘You are not disrupting the democratic process’

“Hopefully, it’s not a sign of what’s to come this year,” Adams told Stateline. “The benefit of all that we have gone through the last several years is that everybody in this room is psychologically prepared in 2024.”

He pointed out that since 2016 — when Russia and China tried to influence the outcome of the presidential election — state election officials have bolstered their relationships with federal cybersecurity and law enforcement agencies, election security experts and with fellow top state officials across the country through information-sharing partnerships.

The COVID-19 pandemic forced election officials to elevate those partnerships in an increasingly stressful and dangerous environment.

While the warnings that Adams and his peers received were stark, state election officials left the conference with a new understanding of the threats, along with new tools to combat them and new allies to help prepare in the months until the 2024 general election.

“We think a lot more creatively today about what could possibly go wrong and what are the challenges than we ever could have thought just four years ago,” Adams added.

Threats of violence and cybersecurity concerns

International criminal groups and foreign adversaries such as China, Iran, North Korea and Russia have made “extraordinary” advances in finding ways to break into systems, steal data and disrupt elections, said Eric Goldstein, executive assistant director for cybersecurity at the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency.

“We are in a really difficult cybersecurity environment right now,” he said.

Commonly called CISA, the federal agency last week unveiled a new website, #Protect2024, to provide resources for state and local election officials during the primary season and the general election in November.

Regionally based federal cybersecurity officials help train local election officials in internet
safety, offer security assessments for voting locations and county courthouses, and encourage county clerk offices to adopt .gov websites.

The same day that CISA unveiled its new website to protect elections, it issued a warning that China is actively targeting America’s critical infrastructure, particularly in the communications, energy, transportation and water systems sectors.

During Goldstein’s presentation, Maine Secretary of State Shenna Bellows and Minnesota Secretary of State Steve Simon, both Democrats, said they worry that county and municipal election officials in rural areas may not take these threats seriously, thinking they are too small to be a target.

“Every single location is at risk regardless of size, regardless of sector,” Goldstein said in response.

The Fight Against Election Lies Never Ends for Local Officials

In early January, a cyberattack disabled court, tax and phone systems in Fulton County, Georgia, which includes Atlanta. Late in the month, local governments in Colorado, Missouri and Pennsylvania were hit with ransomware attacks.

“We’re under attack, and we need to be protecting everything,” said Rich Schliep, chief information officer at the Colorado Department of State, at an adjoining conference in Washington for the National Association of State Election Directors.

State and local election officials also continue to face personal threats at their offices, at ballot tabulation centers and at polling places, while also receiving emailed death threats and hazardous physical mail.

State election officials should invest in gloves, masks and the opioid-reversal drug Narcan, and should know how to safely open mail and what to do with a threatening letter, said Brendan Donahue, assistant inspector in charge at the U.S. Postal Inspection Service, who spoke to both conferences.

Malicious mail isn’t new in the United States, he pointed out, and the law enforcement agency is still investigating a string of fentanyl-laced letters sent to election offices across the country during last November’s elections.

Kansas Secretary of State Scott Schwab, a Republican, encouraged his counterparts to get in contact now with their local FBI field office and its elections crime coordinator.

“You don’t want to do this in the third week of November this year,” Schwab said. “I really encourage you to go and start developing those relationships.”

Artificial intelligence and the disinformation challenge

Last month, voters in New Hampshire received a robocall seemingly from President Joe Biden telling them not to vote in the state’s primary. But when state election officials took a closer look at the call, they found it wasn’t Biden’s voice but one generated from artificial intelligence.

In response, the Federal Communications Commission banned the use of AI-generated voices in robocalls, saying they can be used to suppress the vote. New Hampshire Republican Attorney General John Formella started an investigation and sent a cease-and-desist letter to two Texas-based companies involved in creating the message.

But artificial intelligence can do so much more. AI-generated content can be used to create hyperlocal messages to voters to spread false information about polling place locations or voting times. It can create messages in other languages discouraging foreign-born citizens from voting. Or it can be used to create a flurry of content, even from fake local news outlets, to inflame existing challenges at the polls.

And there’s an internal risk for election offices. Staff could receive a call that sounds like the election administrator asking them to change a voting process. Sophisticated phishing emails could dupe staffers into allowing access to social media accounts or sensitive voter information.

“It’s misinformation on steroids,” said former Kentucky Republican Secretary of State Trey Grayson, who is a member of the National Task Force on Election Crises. “We’ve been dealing with misinformation, disinformation threats for the last few years. But this is just another level.”

State and local election officials are already spending a good deal of time fighting disinformation. Secretaries of state are using #TrustedInfo2024 on social media in promoting the importance of going to trusted sources for election information. AI platform ChatGPT has started directing users with election-related questions to CanIVote.org, a website run by the National Association of Secretaries of State.

It’s a “constant challenge,” said Riley Vetterkind, public information officer for the Wisconsin Elections Commission. The state agency gives municipal election clerks templates for news releases, a calendar of suggested social media posts, webinars for communications strategies and email bulletins on existing disinformation.

In Colorado, election officials have aggressively targeted lies that the 2020 presidential election was stolen and that election systems are vulnerable to substantial levels of fraud.

“We have decided that we’re not going to be a backstop for BS anymore,” said Matt Crane, executive director of the Colorado County Clerks Association. “We’re going to be very aggressive in the public square.”

The challenges build off one another, said Mark Lindeman, policy and strategy director for Verified Voting, a nonprofit that advocates for paper voting records, post-election audits and election security.

But there is hope, he added. It’s easy for things to go wrong in elections, but it’s hard to bring down entire voting systems.

“One of my concerns is that we’re psyching ourselves out, scaring ourselves about all the things that could possibly go wrong,” Lindeman said. “We lose sight sometimes of how we can prepare to meet those challenges and to explain to people that we have met those challenges.”

Stateline is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Stateline maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Scott S. Greenberger for questions: info@stateline.org. Follow Stateline on Facebook and Twitter.