Following the 2020 United States presidential election and the unsuccessful attempts by Donald Trump and various other Republican officials to overturn it, Republican lawmakers initiated a sweeping effort to make voting laws more restrictive within several states across the country. According to the Brennan Center for Justice, as of October 4, 2021, more than 425 bills that would restrict voting access have been introduced in 49 states—with 33 of these bills enacted across 19 states so far. The bills are largely centered around limiting mail-in voting, strengthening voter ID laws, shortening early voting, eliminating automatic and same-day voter registration, curbing the use of ballot drop boxes, and allowing for increased purging of voter rolls. Republicans in at least eight states have also introduced bills that would give lawmakers greater power over election administration after they were unsuccessful in their attempts to overturn election results in swing states won by Democratic candidate Joe Biden in the 2020 election. The efforts garnered press attention and public outrage from Democrats, and by 2023 Republicans had adopted a more "under the radar" approach to achieve their goals.
Supporters of the bills argue they would improve election security and reverse temporary changes enacted during the COVID-19 pandemic; they point to false claims of significant election fraud, as well as the substantial public distrust of the integrity of the 2020 election those claims have fostered, as reasons to tighten election laws. Opponents argue that the efforts amount to voter suppression, are intended to advantage Republicans by reducing the number of people who vote, and would disproportionately affect minority voters; they point to reports that the 2020 election was one of the most secure in American history to counter claims that election laws need to be tightened and argue that public distrust in the 2020 election arises from falsehoods pushed by Republicans, especially former president Donald Trump.
The insistence by Trump and Republicans that the election had been stolen from him by fraud came to be characterized as an implementation of "the big lie" and was also used by Republicans to justify efforts to take control of the administrative management of elections at the state and local level.
Background
Historical efforts
For decades, the Republican Party has supported election integrity initiatives—measures to reduce voter fraud (which is exceedingly rare in the United States) but which critics have alleged are attempts at voter suppression. As summarized by the Associated Press, "stronger voting regulations have long been a conservative goal, driven by oldand some say outdatedconventional wisdom that Republicans thrive in elections with lower turnout, and Democrats in ones with more voters. That has translated to GOP efforts to tighten voter identification laws and require more frequent voter roll purges. Both efforts tend to disproportionally exclude Black and Latino voters, groups that lean Democratic."
In recent history, there have been several waves of voter restriction proposals. Several proposals followed 2000 presidential election when, according to Lawrence Norden, "political operatives realized that small shifts in voting laws could potentially alter the outcome of an election". Another period of increased proposals came in 2013, when the Supreme Court struck down the preclearance provision of the Voting Rights Act of 1965, which required southern states with histories of racial discrimination in voting to pre-clear any changes to voting administration with the federal government. Finally, there was heightened interest after the 2016 presidential election, which Donald Trump (the winner of the election) claimed was marred by voter fraud. However, the quantity of proposals reached its highest level following the 2020 United States presidential election.
2020 presidential election
The 2020 election took place during the COVID-19 pandemic. As a result, many states implemented measures to expand voting access. In particular, mail-in voting (which was seeing significantly increased use in states that already offered no-excuse absentee voting) was expanded in many states. In response, incumbent president Donald Trump spent weeks claiming that mail-in voting would allow the election to be rigged against him. This echoed his 2016 strategy of making unfounded and often conspiratorial claims of voter fraud in the 2016 presidential election.
Immediately following the 2020 election, Donald Trump and his allies in the Republican Party used the false claims of electoral fraud Trump had been propounding for months, as well as a fabricated narrative of an international communist conspiracy involving Hugo Chavez and Dominion Voting Systems, as pretext to initiate an unprecedented effort to overturn the victory of Democratic candidate Joe Biden. They launched over 60 lawsuits, encouraged officials in states with narrow Biden victories to challenge vote certification processes, and attempted to reject the results of several states Biden had won during the congressional certification of the Electoral College results, including by trying to force Vice President Mike Pence to reject those states' electoral votes. Supporters of Trump engaged in a "Stop the Steal" protest movement, while conservative media networks and political commentators, including Newsmax, One America News Network, and Fox News commentators like Sean Hannity and Lou Dobbs, amplified claims that Biden's win was illegitimate. Trump personally pressured Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger to "find 11,780 votes" (the number of votes needed to flip the state), repeatedly urged Georgia governor Brian Kemp to convene a special session of the legislature to overturn Biden's certified victory in the state, and fired the director of the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) shortly after the director refuted claims of election fraud. The effort ultimately culminated in the 2021 storming of the United States Capitol, in which supporters of Donald Trump occupied the Capitol building in an unsuccessful attempt to prevent Congress from certifying the results of the Electoral College. Trump was impeached but not convicted for his role in inciting the mob.
As a result of this effort, more than half of Republicans believed that the election was stolen from Donald Trump. This belief, often referred to as the "Big Lie", has supercharged Republican voting reform efforts, with Republican officials frequently citing false claims of election fraud or the fact that many in the public believe there was fraud as reason to tighten election laws. The effort has also been linked to an attempt to entrench minority rule for the Republican Party.
According to The New York Times, "Out of power in both Congress and the White House, the [Republican] party views its path to regaining a foothold in Washington not solely through animated opposition to Mr. Biden's agenda, but rather through an intense focus on re-engineering the voting system in states where it holds control". Additionally, some Republican politicians and conservative commentators have argued that some "low-quality" people shouldn't be able to vote.
Altogether, this has led to a concerted effort to enact voting restrictions, particularly on mail-in and early voting, automatic and same-day voter registration, the use of ballot drop boxes, and voting without a photo ID, as well as give partisan lawmakers more control over election administration. It has been particularly pronounced in several swing states—especially traditionally red states that swung to Biden in the 2020 election like Georgia and Arizona—as well as in Texas, a red state that has been trending toward the Democratic Party.
Despite a lack of concrete evidence of election fraud, Trump and his supporters continued to insist he won and claimed that the real "big lie" was the idea that he lost. Some Republican activists continued throughout 2021 to pressure state election officials to examine allegations of fraud, asserting they were acting to protect democracy. Michigan secretary of state Jocelyn Benson, who had been a target of such efforts, characterized it as "a political strategy to break down our democracy and put people in charge of our states who are unaccountable and will act in a way that doesn't reflect the will of the people." Polls indicated a large majority of Republicans continued to agree believe that the election was stolen, leading to not only voting reform laws, but also efforts to control the administrative management of elections. Trump ally Steve Bannon said in December 2021 that "we are going to take over the election apparatus." Fascism scholar Timothy Snyder observed: "The lie is so big that it reorders the world. And so part of telling the big lie is that you immediately say it's the other side that tells the big lie. Sadly, but it's just a matter of record, all of that is in Mein Kampf."Multiple sources:
State laws
Alabama Lawmakers in Alabama have introduced more than two dozen election-related bills since the 2020 presidential election, including Republican-backed bills that would restrict early and absentee voting. House Bill 285, for instance, would ban curbside voting (the bill passed the Alabama House of Representatives in a party-line vote on March 18, 2021) while another would shorten the time voters have to mail in absentee applications from five days before an election to 10. Republican Rep. Danny Garrett actually proposed a bill that would increase the number of sites that voters can drop off their absentee ballots, which recently passed the Constitution, Campaigns and Elections House committee, but it has faced consternation among other members of his party, with some objecting that it would "provid[e] for early voting". Rep. Chris Pringle, for instance, claimed that it would lead to "primaries that are going to be stolen using this...they're going to bus them in and pack them out". Republicans have also broadly opposed bills proposed by Democratic lawmakers that would authorize no-excuse absentee voting (existing law requires voters to provide a valid excuse) and institute two weeks of early voting.
Following the announcement in early March that Alabama secretary of state John Merrill would be appointed co-chair of the Republican State Leadership Committee's group on election integrity, which is set to make recommendations on new policies related to voter rolls, voter ID, and absentee voting, Republican "election integrity" efforts are expected to accelerate.
Arizona Alleging election fraud, in April 2021 Arizona Republicans hired a private firm to conduct an audit of the 2020 presidential election results. The auditors released a report five months later finding no proof of fraud and that their ballot recount increased Biden's margin of victory by 360 votes. County election officials released a final report in January 2022 finding that nearly all of the auditors' allegations of irregularities were false or misleading. After a six-month investigation, Arizona attorney general Mark Brnovich, a Republican running for Senate in 2022, said in April 2022 he found no proof of 2020 election fraud.