August 2024

This month I worked with the roundup team to publish a piece analyzing how voting laws have changed in battleground states since 2020. We focused on nine states that played a major role in deciding the last presidential election: Arizona, Florida, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, Texas, and Wisconsin.

In recent years, these states – many of which became focal points of the attempt to undermine the 2020 election – have been particularly active in changing the laws that govern voting and elections. But not all the laws they’ve passed will impact voters this November; some have been blocked or blunted by courts and others have yet to take effect. Arizona, for example, has passed several significant voting restrictions, but the most extreme have been struck down (though these cases are ongoing). In other states like Texas and Georgia, new laws replete with restrictions on voting access have faced extensive litigation but, as of now, remain largely in place, forcing voters to navigate new and confusing hurdles this fall. Michigan, in stark contrast, has dramatically expanded access to the ballot box, and Nevada has similarly only made it easier to vote. But not all battleground states have passed voting legislation at a rapid pace. Because of divided government, states like Wisconsin and Pennsylvania have hardly changed their voting laws – though not for lack of trying.

This was the most interesting piece I’ve worked on for the roundup. For one thing, it answers a pressing question. These states will be in the spotlight this November, and it’s crucial that voters and election officials – as well as the broader public – become aware of how the voting and election rules have changed in these pivotal places. For another, the answer itself is interesting because it spans a wide range. Each battleground state’s unique political and legal dynamics over the last four years have shaped the changes to its voting landscape, and voters across these states will feel widely varying impacts this fall. For these reasons, publishing this piece is a satisfying way to end my time on the Brennan Center’s voting laws roundup. 

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July 2024

This month I traveled to Phoenix to meet with in-state coalition partners and prepare for Arizona’s general election. One concern heading into November is Arizona’s documentary proof of citizenship (DPOC) law. In 2013, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that federal law requires Arizona to allow voters who registered without DPOC to vote in federal elections. Now Arizona has two kinds of registered voters: federal-only voters and full-ballot voters. But in 2022, the state passed laws that further narrowed the path for those without DPOC to vote. The 2022 laws provide that voters who apply using the state registration form will have their applications rejected unless they submit DPOC, and voters who register using the federal registration form cannot vote in presidential elections or by mail unless they submit DPOC. Officials never implemented these laws because they were tied up in litigation, and eventually both these provisions were struck down. But last Thursday a Ninth Circuit panel granted a partial stay as to the first; going forward, anyone who tries to register using a state form but does not provide DPOC will have their registration applications rejected.

I’m very concerned about this Ninth Circuit ruling, as DPOC requirements like this can severely restrict voting access. Many eligible Americans do not have readily available documents proving their citizenship. DPOC laws are also entirely unnecessary; other protections against noncitizen voting, including criminal laws that entail incarceration or deportation, are highly effective. Indeed, noncitizen voting is vanishingly rare. Nevertheless, as a result of the state legislature’s action in 2022 and this Ninth Circuit decision, eligible Arizonans could be disenfranchised this year.

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June 2024

As part of my work to prevent election subversion in November, I’ve been researching certification law in battleground states. Certification is the process by which election officials approve the accuracy of election results. While it’s an important process, it’s supposed to be ministerial—a formality that takes place after an election winds down to certify its completion. But as with many other ordinary election processes, certification has been under attack since 2020.

Attacks on the certification process began on January 6—when insurrectionists stormed the Capitol to stop Congress from certifying the legitimate election results—but since then they’ve shifted to the local and state level. The 2022 midterms saw efforts to block certification in states across the country. For example, two election officials in Surry County, North Carolina, refused to vote to certify the results and were ultimately removed from office. And the Cochise County, Arizona Board of Supervisors voted against certifying the county’s returns. To justify their efforts, officials cited the kinds of conspiracy theories, falsehoods, and vague concerns that undergird the election denier movement. And while each county’s returns were ultimately certified, these kinds of disruptions create chaos in election administration, sow doubt about our elections, and threaten to disenfranchise significant numbers of voters.

Given this threat, in preparation for the 2024 election, I’ve focused my research on state law governing certification in certain battleground states. I’ve worked to identify not only legal vulnerabilities to attacks on the process but also legal mechanisms to resolve certification crises. Even though the research is fairly technical, I enjoy doing it because this sort of preparation is crucial to preventing rogue officials from derailing the general election process.

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May 2024

This month we published our second roundup of 2024. We found that at least six states enacted seven restrictive laws; at least one state, South Dakota, passed an election interference law; and at least 11 states enacted 14 expansive laws. Among the new restrictive laws is one in Alabama that makes it a crime to deliver another voter’s absentee ballot application. Laws like Alabama’s have always stood out to me as particularly cruel. Bans on absentee voting assistance target elderly and disabled voters, and assigning criminal penalties to such conduct is simply unduly punitive; people engaged in ordinary good faith voting activity should not have to fear criminal liability.

We tracked a few more trends in 2024, including bills related to noncitizen voting. False allegations that noncitizens are fraudulently voting have been circulating lately—on social media, in Congress, and indeed in state legislatures. But voting by noncitizens in state and federal elections is vanishingly rare, as it’s already illegal and states have multiple systems in place to deter it. Even so, at least 24 states this year have introduced 54 bills that reiterate that only U.S. citizens can vote, require people to provide documentary proof of citizenship at registration, or direct election officials to find and cancel noncitizen voter registrations. Not all these bills are restrictive: some wouldn’t effect a practical change in law, and others wouldn’t prevent eligible citizens from registering or voting. But some, like a new Indiana restriction, risk disenfranchising eligible voters. Indiana’s new law requires officials to cross-check voter registration data with motor vehicle records to identify potential noncitizens and gives anyone flagged 30 days to present documentary proof of citizenship. Motor vehicle data is often outdated, and many eligible citizens lack the documents required to prove citizenship, so this law risks wrongly removing naturalized citizens from the voting rolls.

With the new laws from this year, there are now 28 states in which voters will face restrictions in the 2024 general election that weren’t in place in the last presidential election. I was interviewed for a CNN story about this statistic. This kind of cumulative data helps us understand how the voting landscape has changed since 2020, which is important context for voters as they navigate the rules in their states this November.

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April 2024

Lately I’ve been working on some behind-the-scenes advocacy in battleground states in advance of the 2024 election. While much of the Brennan Center’s advocacy is public, we’re also constantly engaged in behind-the-scenes work to press for policies and practices that mitigate threats of election interference and expand access to the ballot box. Whether to push publicly or quietly for a particular policy or practice is a strategic choice, often based on the political realities in a particular state or subdivision. If we don’t think that attaching our brand as a national progressive policy institute to an effort will make it easier for those in power to enact the change we seek, then we may choose to advocate in the background. This method can be extremely effective; over the past few months, I’ve successfully pressed for several new procedural guidelines for voting and elections. And I’ve found that the lack of public recognition for these successes doesn’t diminish them, but in a way makes them more meaningful. Behind-the-scenes work like this has also helped me foster relationships and build connections with government officials in key battleground states. This month, for example, I had the chance to travel to one of these states and meet with the AG’s office to discuss their preparations for the November election. 

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March 2024

This month I traveled to Williamsburg, Virginia, to attend a Rights Restoration summit at William & Mary Law School. This convening involved not only voting rights lawyers, but also community organizers, election workers, and policymakers from around the state. It had a practical goal: to give organizers and advocates for voting rights restoration in Virginia the chance to connect, share knowledge, and strategize. Now, more than ever, this goal is imperative.

As of last year, Virginia is the only state in the country that categorically and permanently bars anyone convicted of any type of felony from voting unless they apply for, and the government approves, individual rights restoration. It wasn’t always so. While the Virginia constitution disenfranchises all citizens with past felony convictions, it grants the governor the power to reinstate rights, and advocates for years have made significant gains urging successive governors to broadly exercise this authority. By the time Gov. Youngkin took office in 2022, his predecessor’s policy—which he initially continued—automatically restored voting rights to every person upon the completion of their prison sentence. In a dramatic setback, however, Gov. Youngkin quietly terminated this policy in 2023. Now Virginians with convictions must apply to the governor to have their rights restored on an individual basis.

This summit was truly a privilege to attend. A central theme that emerged was how lawyers and organizers who have a shared purpose can coordinate to each advance the other’s agenda. I loved learning from community organizers in Virginia about the steps they’ve taken to oppose Gov. Youngkin’s new policy and the obstacles they face in their opposition. I also found, perhaps surprisingly, that I enjoyed the process of explaining the ongoing litigation in Virginia to a non-lawyer audience; although it can be difficult to describe litigation in practical terms, it’s a crucial skill for a legal advocate and I found the whole process quite satisfying. The kind of communication this summit fostered and the general goodwill of everyone in attendance, from lawyers to policymakers to organizers, gave me hope for change in Virginia.

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February 2024

Anti-subversion work in Arizona has consumed much of my time as of late. And for good reason: during the last year, election denialist individuals and organizations filed at least eight lawsuits in Arizona courts challenging the state’s voting and election procedures, with six of these cases filed in just the last two months. Most allege that provisions of the Arizona Secretary of State’s Elections Procedures Manual, or the manual in its entirety, are unlawful under state or federal law. Although they involve similar parties, these cases are separate from the post-election litigation by election denialists following Arizona’s 2022 midterms, which has also been abundant. Unlike post-election litigation, these new cases don’t seek to overturn specific election results; instead, taking aim at the 2024 presidential election, they endeavor to create chaos in election administration, make it harder for voters to cast their ballots, and make it less likely that eligible voters’ legal ballots will be counted. Among other things, this onslaught of anti-voter litigation aims to curtail the availability of ballot drop boxes, hamper the signature verification process for absentee ballots, implement stricter documentary proof of citizenship requirements, and restrict out-of-precinct voting. In my research, I’ve found that these legal challenges in Arizona share many of the same objectives as the restrictive voting legislation that I track for the roundup – the most obvious target being absentee voting. As the Brennan Center considers a response to this legal activity in Arizona, I’ll continue to pay attention to these similarities, as they tell us about the strategy of those seeking to undermine our democracy in 2024.

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January 2024

This month we published our final roundup for 2023 (or first roundup for 2024, depending on how you look at it). It covered the entire year – from January 1, 2023, to December 31, 2023. This roundup did two things: it looked back on all the restrictive, interference, and expansive laws passed by states last year, and it looked ahead at all the legislation already pending for 2024.

As to 2023, not much has happened since our October roundup because most states weren’t in regular legislative session. Over the entire year, we found that 14 states enacted 17 restrictive voting laws, 6 states enacted 7 election interference laws, and 23 states enacted 53 expansive voting laws. Although this amounts to a lot of expansive laws, expansive laws don’t cancel out restrictive ones, particularly when they’re passing in different states. As for 2024, at least 140 restrictive voting bills that were either pre-filed or carried over are pending in 25 states to consider in 2024. And 20 election interference bills that were pre-filed or carried over are pending in 12 states. Based on what we’re seeing, it’s worth keeping an eye on Wisconsin, Missouri, and Virginia this year, which all have restrictive or interference bills pending (or both). 

We wanted to recognize something else in this roundup, too: the new year brings the first presidential election since 2020. Lies about the 2020 election spurred the wave of voting restrictions and election interference policies that we’ve seen over the past three years. So, we sought to determine the impact of this wave on voters this November. This required researching not only the effective dates of the laws that passed, but also the litigation that may have left those laws temporarily or permanently blocked. We found that in the 2024 elections, voters in 18 states will face for the first-time voting restrictions enacted since 2020, while voters in 27 states will face restrictions that they’ve never experienced in a presidential election before (some were in place in the 2022 midterms). With respect to interference laws, at least five states will have new election interference laws in place, and for 13 states this will be the first presidential election with these interference laws in effect. While the research behind these stats takes a lot of time, it is important that advocates, policymakers, and the public understand how many voters will feel the impact this November of the widespread lies about the 2020 election and the legislation these lies fueled.

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December 2023

I spent much of December creating a resource on politician’s efforts to make it harder for citizens to pass ballot initiatives. The piece was inspired by events last summer in Ohio, in which lawmakers tried to change the procedural rules to make it harder for citizens to amend the constitution. And they didn’t do this because of legitimate concerns that the ballot initiative process needs to be regulated; they did it because they didn’t like the abortion-rights policy that Ohioans were poised to pass. The events in Ohio received a lot of attention, in part because the lawmakers scheduled the vote on the procedural changes in August, when voters are on summer vacation and turnout is markedly low. But in my research, I found that the general blueprint – politicians manipulating procedural rules around ballot initiatives because they don’t like the policies citizens are enacting – isn’t unique to Ohio.

For the article, a couple colleagues and I catalogued every instance in the last five years in which state legislatures passed resolutions to make it harder to enact citizen-initiated ballot measures. Lawmakers often do this by increasing the number of petition signatures required to get a measure on the ballot or increasing the approval percentage needed for a ballot measure to be adopted. We found that most of these legislative efforts can be traced to lawmakers’ disapproval of a recently enacted ballot measure or an upcoming ballot proposal. For example, in 2019, Michigan enacted a law (later struck down by the Michigan Supreme Court) to hinder signature collection by barring any given congressional district from contributing more than 15 percent of signatures for an initiative. Importantly, just a month before this bill was introduced, Michigan voters had approved ballot measures to create an independent redistricting commission and install expansive voter-access policies.

Working on this project required thinking critically about the role of ballot initiatives in democracy. There are valid concerns about how to ensure the ballot initiative process provides for adequate stability in the law and the protection of minority rights. But ballot initiatives can also help citizens overcome structural impediments like gerrymandered legislative districts. And gamesmanship by state officials to derail specific citizen initiatives they dislike is undemocratic. I enjoyed grappling with these nuances as I helped write this piece. 

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November 2023

This month, I’ve been heavily focused on Arizona—a locus of election denial and subversion efforts in recent years. In Arizona’s 2020 presidential election, Republican party leaders offered to serve as “fake electors,” and Arizona legislators tried to hijack the certification process. The trend continued in last year’s midterm elections: armed vigilantes intimidated voters at ballot drop boxes, local officials in two counties refused to certify results, and a few candidates who lost their elections refused to concede. Over the past couple months, I’ve been attending meetings with attorneys in the Defending Democracy Coalition, an alliance of voting rights organizations that are working to prevent subversion in Arizona’s 2024 elections. Then, a few weeks ago, I traveled to Phoenix for a conference held by the coalition. I really enjoyed getting to meet in-person the people I’ve been collaborating with virtually on these issues. It was particularly valuable to have the chance to form connections with the Arizona-based advocates, who are deeply familiar with the situation on the ground and absolutely crucial to any advocacy work we may do in the state.  

In other news, I was quoted in my first news article this month! A USA Today reporter interviewed me about the voting laws passed this year across the country and how they could impact the 2024 elections. Given my work on the Voting Laws Roundup, I had plenty to say, and ended up being quoted several times throughout the article. 

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October 2023

This month we published our third roundup of the year. This is the first roundup we’ve released since I started co-leading the team. While the work that goes into tracking bills and drafting is not easy, my new role in managing the publication of the roundup creates an additional layer of difficulty. It requires not only collecting and incorporating feedback from many members of the Brennan Center staff, but also establishing the timeline and coordinating among interested staff to make sure that publication remains on schedule.

The roundup went up last week. We found that, as of October 10th: 14 states enacted 17 restrictive voting laws, 6 states enacted 7 election interference laws, and 23 states enacted 47 expansive voting laws. We also highlighted North Carolina as a current hot spot of anti-democracy legislation. This month, the North Carolina legislature overrode two of the governor’s vetoes to enact an omnibus restrictive voting law and a particularly concerning election interference law. The restrictive voting law, S.B. 747, shortens the window to return mail ballots, bans the use of ballot drop boxes, and increases the chances that voters using same-day registration do not have their ballots counted. The interference law, S.B. 749, restructures state and county boards of elections to have an even partisan split. Boards of elections certify election results in North Carolina, and deadlock over certification could leave resolution in the hands of partisan state lawmakers.   

Although my new role on the roundup team is a challenge, playing a greater part in the process makes it more gratifying when a roundup is successfully published.

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September 2023

I’ve now passed the one-year mark for my fellowship, and I have, as usual, a mix of things on my plate. First, I’ve continued to focus heavily on voting rights restoration, primarily by providing legal support to the defendants in the Florida voter prosecutions. But I’ve also been looking forward, thinking about a long-term strategy on combatting felony disenfranchisement. Challenges to felony disenfranchisement laws have generally fared poorly in the courts, yet last month, a Fifth Circuit panel held that Mississippi’s lifetime ban on voting for people convicted of certain felonies violates the Eighth Amendment’s bar against “cruel and unusual” punishments. This ruling, should it stand, means there is hope yet.

Further, I’ve become busier with the state voting laws roundup, as I now co-lead the team with one of my colleagues. This involves making day-to-day decisions about how to classify the likely impact of legislative proposals, but it also requires me to step back and make big picture observations in order to frame the narrative. And it entails logistical matters, such as managing and training others and deciding publishing timelines. I’ve enjoyed this new responsibility.

Finally, yesterday I spoke on a panel at Louisiana State University on equity at the ballot box. I loved hearing from the other panelists, who were professors and civil rights leaders in Louisiana. These individuals gave valuable insight into the most pressing voting and election issues in the state, while I had the chance to situate some of Louisiana’s voting practices in the broader context of our county. I look forward to more speaking engagements, as they allow me to meet interesting and important people in the voting rights space with whom I might not otherwise cross paths. 

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August 2023

Although I’ve continued my usual projects this past month—responding to Florida’s voter prosecutions and analyzing state voting legislation—I’ve also been working in a new area: federal legislative advocacy. In June, the Vice President for Democracy at the Brennan Center testified in a joint hearing in the House of Representatives before the Committee on House Administration and the Committee on Oversight and Accountability. I’ve been assisting her in responding to Questions for the Record (QFRs) from Members of Congress after the hearing. The hearing concerned the American Confidence in Elections (ACE) Act, particularly its Washington, D.C.-focused provisions. House Republicans first introduced the ACE Act in 2022 as a purported alternative to the pro-voter Freedom to Vote: John R. Lewis Act. They reintroduced the bill last month. But the ACE Act wouldn’t address the serious threats to the freedom to vote across the country, like election denial campaigns, efforts to manipulate election processes, and new restrictive voting laws. Indeed, unlike the Freedom to Vote Act, it wouldn’t set baseline national standards that protect our democracy. Instead, the bill would undermine voter access and fair election administration, particularly in Washington, D.C.—for example, by banning voter registration in the 30 days before an election and creating inflexible standards for voter roll maintenance. I’ve enjoyed helping with these QFRs, as I’ve learned about D.C.’s voting and election administration policies and have also gained insight into federal legislative reform efforts, an area of voting rights work I hadn’t previously encountered. 

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July 2023

The Supreme Court’s 2022-2023 term has officially ended, and its final month brought a slew of notable decisions that may impact the Brennan Center’s work—and, by extension, the work I do in my fellowship. We’ve spent the last month or so reflecting on these Supreme Court opinions and debating how, if at all, they should impact our advocacy strategy both in the courts and the legislatures. Among these cases are the decision ending affirmative action in college admissions (Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard), the decision protecting the right of a business owner to discriminate based on sexual orientation (303 Creative v. Elenis), and the decision blocking President Biden’s student loan debt relief plan (Biden v. Nebraska). But we’ve focused on two cases that bear directly on our voting rights work and constitute genuine wins for democracy: Moore v. Harper and Allen v. Milligan.

In Harper, the Supreme Court rejected a radical interpretation of the Constitution that would have given state legislatures near-absolute power to regulate federal elections. I spent the first few weeks of my fellowship conducting research for the amicus brief we filed in this case, which documented the laws that would be endangered by an embrace of the “independent state legislature” theory. In a significant victory, the Supreme Court in Harper agreed that our traditional system of checks and balances still applies in the elections context, meaning state courts and constitutions continue to constrain legislative overreach. As for Milligan, in its ruling, the Supreme Court upheld a lower court’s decision to strike down an Alabama congressional map because it diluted the voting power of Black Alabamians in violation of the Voting Rights Act. The decision—authored by Chief Justice John Roberts—was a welcome surprise given Chief Justice Roberts’ role in the Court’s recent history of doing harm to the Voting Rights Act. The Brennan Center had also filed an amicus brief in this case.  

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June 2023

June has been a busy month. On June 14, we published the second voting laws roundup of 2023. This roundup, like February’s, took an immense amount of work given the high volume of state voting legislation. We found that, since January 1, at least 11 states have enacted 13 restrictive voting laws. This number has since increased, with the governors of Texas and Oklahoma signing two more bills into law. But we also found that 13 states enacted 19 expansive voting laws, with an additional 4 laws signed after the report’s cutoff date. Although there’s some overlap between states passing restrictive laws and those passing expansive laws (for example, Texas enacted both kinds of measures), there’s still a geographical divide, with expansive legislation tending to pass in some states while restrictive legislation tends to pass in other states. The next roundup we publish will likely see less activity, as fewer than one third of state legislatures are still in session. 

Then, on June 20, the court heard oral argument on a motion to dismiss our legal challenge to Florida’s flawed voter registration application. My colleague, Eliza, argued for the plaintiffs. As we wait for a ruling, we’re also planning for the next stage of the case: discovery.

Finally, June 25 was the 10^th anniversary of the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision in Shelby County v. Holder, which gutted a central part of the Voting Rights Act. The Shelby County decision rendered the VRA’s preclearance process – which required jurisdictions with histories of racial discrimination to obtain federal approval of changes to voting policies – inoperative. The decision left states free to implement discriminatory voting laws and signaled that they could do so without fear of legal consequences. States heard this message, enacting a barrage of restrictive voting legislation in the wake of Shelby County. My colleague and I completed a “roundup of roundups,” counting every restrictive voting law enacted in the 10 years following the decision. We found that, since Shelby County was decided, at least 29 states have passed 94 restrictive voting laws. And at least 29 of these laws were passed in 11 states that had been subject to preclearance, either in whole or in part, when the decision came out. This project served as a striking example of the quiet but significant role the courts play in our state voting laws roundup.

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May 2023

Last month I traveled to the University of Alabama to speak at a political science symposium on behalf of the Brennan Center. The topic was felony disenfranchisement. Specifically, I was asked to present on the legal and constitutional issues involved in the current battle against felony disenfranchisement laws, and to outline what theories or strategies have proven most promising in striking these laws. This prompt was not easy; the fact is that litigation on this issue has generally not fared well. But I didn’t want to tell a hopeless story of lost court battles, because that would omit important wins outside the courts and crucial shifts in public opinion. So, I provided a case study.

The case study was on Florida—a place I’ve been dedicating much of my time these days. To tell the story of rights restoration efforts in Florida, I drew from my current work tracking the prosecutions of people with past convictions for registering and voting while allegedly ineligible and challenging the state’s flawed voter registration application in court. But the Brennan Center’s presence in Florida goes back much further. So, in preparation for my presentation, I spoke with colleagues about the organization’s history in the state. I learned about our lawsuit challenging Florida’s felony disenfranchisement scheme in 2000, and then, when that ultimately failed, the shift in strategy toward urging governors to do more in their exercise of clemency. I learned about the push to get Amendment 4 on the ballot—advocates reached the conclusion that a constitutional amendment was the only way to achieve meaningful, sustained progress—and ultimately approved. I also gained background on the legislative advocacy against the pay-to-vote requirement of S.B. 7066, which was devised to undercut Amendment 4, before the ultimate decision to challenge the law in court.

I hope that tracing the recent history of the rights restoration fight in Florida sent the intended message to students in the audience that litigation is not the only tool available to us, nor is it always the most effective. Civil rights lawyers have to be flexible with our approach to voting rights restoration and use the tools that are right for the fight in a particular moment. And I think this is a hopeful message, a reason not to get too down when courts disappoint us. The fight very much continues.

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April 2023

Today, we sued Florida over its flawed voter registration application. Florida’s voter eligibility rules for people with felony convictions are highly complex. But you wouldn’t know that based on the state’s voter registration application, which doesn’t provide any guidance for people with past convictions about their eligibility to vote. Our lawsuit argues that the lack of information on voter eligibility requirements violates the National Voter Registration Act (NVRA).

The NVRA requires states’ mail-in voter registration application to “specify” each voter eligibility requirement. In Florida, the voter eligibility requirements for those with felony convictions depend on their offense, sentence, and court of conviction. Also relevant, because of Florida’s pay-to-vote requirement, is whether a person owes certain types of legal financial obligations—an assessment that is often confusing. Yet Florida’s voter registration application mentions none of these rules. It only says “[i]f you have been convicted of a felony … you cannot register until your right to vote has been restored.”

Given this dearth of information, it’s no surprise that ineligible voters are misled by Florida’s voter registration application and register to vote. But rather than educating the public on its nightmarishly complex rules, or fixing its form to comply with federal law, the state has started prosecuting people who were confused or misled about their voter eligibility. These prosecutions have not only upended the lives of dozens of returning citizens, but also hindered organizations that conduct voter registration drives, like the Florida State Conference of the NAACP and the League of Women Voters of Florida. These groups now have to worry that by handing someone Florida’s faulty voter registration application, they could be putting them at risk of future prosecution.

In view of the high stakes, the Brennan Center has partnered with co-counsel at the ACLU, ACLU of Florida, LDF, and O’Melveny & Meyers, to represent the League of Women Voters of Florida and the Florida NAACP in a lawsuit demanding that the state fix its voter registration application. This lawsuit is the first I’ve participated in as an attorney; I’m grateful to be a part of the fight and look forward to what comes next.

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March 2023

At the end of February, the Brennan Center published our first Voting Laws Roundup of 2023. This roundup covered legislation introduced between January 1 and 25, and reached every state legislature in the country, except for three that were not in session. Getting this roundup out was a heavy lift. Since the 2020 election, voting legislation has taken on new importance in state legislatures; I had thought, however, this focus on voting legislation might be abating. Based on the high volume of bills introduced or pre-filed at the start of the 2023 legislative session, that is not the case. With this many bills to digest, publishing the February roundup required a team effort, so many voting attorneys on other projects volunteered to help us.

In examining this swath of legislation, we found that state lawmakers introduced restrictive voting bills at a record-breaking pace in the early weeks of 2023, with 32 states introducing or prefiling at least 150 restrictive voting bills. This surpasses the totals from the same point in 2021 or 2022 and indicates that the post-2020 playbook—state legislators focusing on making voting more difficult— persists. As I am often reminded, however, this high number of restrictive bills won’t necessarily yield a record-breaking number of voting restrictions becoming law. Last year, for example, saw fewer restrictive bills enacted than in 2021, even though the number of introduced bills at this time last year was higher than in 2021.

In better news, while there is usually an increase in legislative activity in odd years, we found that fewer election interference bills were introduced this year than at this time last year—potentially a response to the 2022 midterms, in which voters largely rejected election denier candidates. As for expansive voting legislation, we have also seen a dip this year compared to 2021. Nevertheless, after we published the roundup, Minnesota enacted a law that automatically restores voting rights to people with felony convictions on probation and parole. Despite the onslaught of restrictive legislation, I was very heartened by this win in my home state of Minnesota.

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February 2023

This week I am flying to Florida for a convening among civil rights organizations to discuss current and future work related to returning citizens’ voting rights in the state. The event is timely: on Wednesday, Governor DeSantis signed SB 4B, which expands the authority of Florida’s Office of Statewide Prosecution (OSP) to investigate and prosecute voting-related crimes. With this law, OSP seeks to establish jurisdiction to prosecute some of the 20 returning citizens arrested by Florida’s new election police force for what appear to be honest mistakes about voting eligibility. I have been helping to track these prosecutions, and four have already been dismissed by Florida courts on the grounds that OSP lacks authority to prosecute the allegations it has raised. This new law seeks to make an end-run around these court decisions.

As I track the prosecutions, I am also trying to understand their broader impact, including their chilling effect on returning citizens who are eligible to vote. I am therefore continuing to reach out to returning citizens and community-based groups in Florida. These outreach conversations remind me of the obstacles that formerly imprisoned people face—not only barriers to voting but to employment, housing, and other aspects of their lives. The civil rights of people with past convictions is an issue I care deeply about. While in law school, I represented imprisoned people in parole hearings, worked with returning citizens to restore their voting rights, and participated in litigation challenging SB 7066, the Florida law that requires those with felony convictions to pay off certain court debts before they are allowed to vote. I am very much looking forward to my trip to Florida and to continue this work.

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January 2023

For state lawmakers across the country, the start of the new year means the start of a new legislative session. For me, it means a slew of new state voting legislation to examine in anticipation of the Brennan Center’s next Voting Laws Roundup. Voting Laws Roundup work comprises two parts: (1) the continuous tracking of state voting legislation and (2) the periodic release of a Roundup that explains the trends we see.

As for the first, tracking every piece of voting legislation in every state legislature in the country is time intensive. It involves not only researching legislation but also assessing the impact of each provision—whether the proposed change would make it harder or easier to register, stay on the rolls, or vote; enable partisan interference or threaten the people and processes that make elections work; or have neither consequence. Certain bills, especially more novel proposals, can be difficult to categorize, but I’ve found that it gets easier with practice and helps to talk it through with others. And we make these assessments not in a vacuum but as compared to existing law, which grounds our work. The tracking process serves an important purpose, as the internal data keeps us apprised of both pro-voter reforms and threats to voting rights and informs our strategy, including, among other things, the decision to challenge a law in court.

While tracking can be onerous, identifying trends in this vast pool of legislation has its own challenges. I have just begun this step but have already found it difficult to transition from delving into the weeds of a piece of legislation to stepping back and surveying the landscape from a broader perspective. But this step, too, is crucial, as the Roundup that we publish serves as a public resource and helps shape the narrative on the threat to voting rights. And the trends that we identify further inform the Brennan Center’s own advocacy priorities. Although challenging at times, it is gratifying to contribute to this core aspect of the Brennan Center’s work.

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December 2022

This month the Supreme Court heard oral arguments in Moore v. Harper, a case that could have dire consequences on our country’s elections. I listened closely, having spent much of my time at the Brennan Center conducting research for the amicus brief we filed in the case.

Moore v. Harper arose from an egregious partisan gerrymander by the North Carolina legislature. In February, the North Carolina Supreme Court struck down the gerrymandered congressional map for violating the state constitution. After lawmakers proposed a second gerrymandered map, a state court adopted a special-master drawn plan. Now some North Carolina lawmakers have asked the U.S. Supreme Court to reinstate the gerrymandered map by embracing a fringe notion called the independent state legislature theory (ISLT). The ISLT is a radical interpretation of the Constitution that would give state legislatures near-absolute power to regulate federal elections. It is premised on a misguided reading of the word “legislature” in the Elections Clause. While recent scholarship has debunked the theory, three sitting justices have signaled their openness to it in the past, and the Supreme Court’s embrace of it could cause a significant disruption.

The Brennan Center’s amicus brief in Moore v. Harper catalogs the constitutional provisions, ballot initiatives, state court rulings, statutory delegations, and administrative regulations that could be at risk if the court embraces the ISLT. Ascertaining the scope and volume of rules at stake required a large team of legal researchers. As part of this team, I delved deep into various sources of state law, searching for rules that regulate federal elections and could be affected by the court’s decision. The Brennan Center used this research to produce a compilation of state laws endangered by the ISLT, which it cites in the brief. Our findings are alarming: the ISLT could not only remove important constraints on partisan gerrymandering and voter suppression, but could cause chaos in the administration of elections, nullifying basic rules governing registration and voting processes.

During oral arguments, certain forms of the ISLT seemed to be too extreme for most of the court to accept, but some justices expressed interest in other dangerous paths. Given the stakes of Moore v. Harper, I am glad I had a chance to contribute to the larger effort to convince the court to reject the ISLT.

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November 2022

Two matters have defined my past month at the Brennan Center: (1) election protection for the midterms and (2) the recent wave of voter prosecutions in Florida.

As for the first, I spent Election Day in a Brennan Center “war room”—a conference room with attorneys and researchers monitoring elections across the country. The longer I spent in this room, the more I grew to appreciate the invaluable role that local election workers play in protecting our elections. Despite facing extraordinary pressure in the face of election denialism, local election officials were competent and well-trained to navigate the glitches that inevitably arise in election administration; because of them, voting was a safe and calm experience, and the election was secure. As the results poured in over the next several days, something else became clear as well: election deniers who sought to oversee elections in key swing states lost their contests. For example, election denying candidates for secretary of state in Arizona, Michigan and Nevada lost, as did candidates for governor in Arizona, Michigan, and Pennsylvania. These outcomes sent a message: voters do not want election deniers to control the machinery of their democracy.

In addition to election protection work, I have spent the past few weeks monitoring a series of voter prosecutions in Florida. In 2018, Florida voters approved Amendment 4, which automatically restored voting rights to most people with past convictions. But soon after, state lawmakers passed S.B. 7066, which bars people from regaining their voting rights if they have outstanding court debts related to their conviction. Since enacting S.B. 7066, Florida has had a deeply confusing rights restoration system; the state has not been able to timely verify voter eligibility, nor has it provided adequate guidance to the public about who can vote and who cannot. Now the state has charged more than 30 people with past convictions—at least 24 of whom are Black—for allegedly registering or voting while ineligible in 2020. But most if not all of those charged did not know they were ineligible to vote, having been confused or misled as to their eligibility. And these arrests took place in the run-up to the midterms—with Governor DeSantis calling the August arrests the “opening salvo” for his new election police force—producing concerns that these prosecutions have intimidated people with past convictions who are eligible to vote. Accordingly, I have been reaching out to returning citizens and community-based groups in Florida to try to assess the impact of the arrests on eligible voters.

While the election denier candidates’ electoral losses bring a sense of relief in anticipation of 2024, the voter prosecutions in Florida are a sobering reminder that there is still so much work to be done.

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October 2022

My focus this month has been assisting the Brennan Center in its efforts to combat election subversion. I have done this through (1) tracking election interference legislation and (2) researching legal responses to election sabotage scenarios.

First, I have been assisting the Brennan Center in tracking voting legislation in every state legislature in the country. Based on this data, we release a Voting Laws Roundup a few times a year that explains the trends we see. One trend that has persisted since 2020 is the increase in election interference legislation—bills that would enable partisan interference in elections or threaten the people and processes that facilitate elections. Just this year, we have identified at least seven states that have enacted twelve election interference laws. Eleven of these laws are in effect for the upcoming Midterms. Tracking and identifying election interference legislation has helped me to better grasp the scope of the crisis and the various threats to our democratic system.

Second, I have spent the past few weeks researching the application of the Due Process Clause to attempts at election sabotage. This work has required not only examining constitutional precedent but also considering factual scenarios involving direct attempts to overturn election results or indirect attempts at subversion through disenfranchisement. It has been satisfying to work on one problem from multiple angles, not only tracking laws that open the door to election sabotage, but also preparing a legal response in the event of an attempt.

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September 2022

The rapid approach of the midterm elections has shaped my first month as a voting rights fellow at the Brennan Center. Recent press reports indicate that proponents of the Big Lie—the false claim that the 2020 election was “stolen”—are being recruited to serve as poll workers in the upcoming election. In response to this threat to election integrity, the Brennan Center has been working with All Voting is Local to create state-by-state guides detailing the constraints on poll workers and means by which election officials can ensure poll workers follow the law when executing their duties. I have spent my time been assisting with drafting these guides. This work has entailed diving into state election codes, regulations, manuals, and handbooks to ascertain the guardrails in place to prevent those who would seek to undermine an election from qualifying as poll workers or disrupting the election process.

The good news, I have found, is that states have many rules in place to do just that: to ensure nonpartisan election administration and block attempts to intimidate voters or spread disinformation at the polls. And poll workers are often required to take oaths, not only to fulfil their duties but also to uphold state and federal law in doing so. An interesting part of this research has involved determining the chain of command—that is, identifying who is responsible for appointing, training, compensating, and removing a poll worker—as it underscores that poll workers do not answer to political parties or candidates, but rather, to local governing bodies or boards of election. I hope that these memorandums will help remind election officials and voters, as well as proponents of election falsehoods, that poll worker conduct is subject to meaningful constraints—which, if enforced, will help preserve the integrity of the midterm elections.