The many election lawsuits and legal challenges from President Trump’s campaign have mostly failed to alter election processes substantially, either in terms of the 2020 race or future contests.
That leaves the burden to address complaints about mail-in voting, ballot harvesting, and other election administration issues with state and federal lawmakers, some of whom are already making moves to change election statutes.
The first step for many state legislators: Learn the details of elections administration before proposing any alterations.
“Most people do not understand the electoral process and all that goes into it, including my colleagues,” Wisconsin state Sen. Kathy Bernier told the Washington Examiner.
Bernier, a Republican who was a county clerk for over 12 years and has been chairwoman of the Wisconsin Senate campaign and elections committee for eight years, said that her colleagues concerned about election administration have requested a meeting to go over the processes.
Lawmakers in Pennsylvania and Arizona have called for audits and reviews of the election processes there, as well.
Congress may save state officials from having to make substantial decisions about election laws themselves.
Pennsylvania Republican Rep. Mike Kelly on Tuesday introduced the Protect Election Integrity Act of 2020 in the House, a companion bill to that of Missouri Republican Sen. Josh Hawley’s in the Senate, that seeks to use federal funding to tighten election security, increase transparency, and streamline the election processes.
“We really firmly believe that there’s going to have to be some type of federal oversight when you look at what’s happened,” Kelly told the Washington Examiner in an interview Tuesday.
The bill would require states that receive federal funds to administer their elections to ban “ballot harvesting” by allowing only designated election officials, Postal Service employees, or a family member or caregiver to return mail-in or absentee ballots. Another measure would require round-the-clock video surveillance monitoring of absentee ballot drop boxes. One ballot drop box in Boston was set on fire. Two men in Florida were charged with stealing ballots from a drop box.
Other measures in the bill aim to streamline the ballot counting process in order to make results known sooner. Elections officials would have to reveal their staffing and election plans prior to Election Day. States would also be required to process absentee and mail-in ballots as soon as they are received — preventing the situation seen in Pennsylvania, where officials were legally prohibited from processing ballots until the day of the election, delaying the reporting of results.
With Democrats having a hold on the House majority, Kelly can’t pass the bill without bipartisan support. But despite those steep odds, it’s his constituents that prompted him to introduce the bill.
“It’s hard to be in the town that I live in without seeing people” asking him about the election, Kelly said. “People come up, they say, ‘What are you guys going to do about this? I mean, I can’t believe this is happening.'”
Don’t expect mail-in or absentee voting to be significantly scaled back when it comes to state-level actions. Many of the states that changed election laws to allow no-excuse, absentee-by-mail voting did so well before the coronavirus pandemic hit.
“I have not heard once one person utter the words that we got to get rid of absentee voting, aka early voting,” said Brenier, the Wisconsin state senator. “We do want to streamline the process,” she added, including by codifying drop boxes for ballots.
In Nevada, where Democratic lawmakers opted to mail a ballot to every voter on the rolls, Republicans are the minority in the state Legislature and have little power to change the law. And while Republicans have legislative power in Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania, the Democratic governors there can veto substantial changes.
Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer already vetoed one Republican measure to strengthen election fraud penalties. In response to Michigan’s Democratic secretary of state mailing absentee ballot applications to every voter on file, Michigan state Sen. Kevin Daley proposed a bill that made fraudulently completing an absentee ballot application on behalf of someone else a felony.
Daley told the Washington Examiner that he might reintroduce the bill again in the next legislative session and that he and his colleagues are still going through the results of this election before settling on specific measures.
“If we don’t have a fair and trusted election, we’ve lost our country,” Daley said. “We have to make sure that we can verify and prove that there has been a clear, clean election placed, or people will lose faith in our country, and I’m afraid we’re in serious problems going forward.”
The outstanding lawsuits hamper state lawmakers’ ability to propose specific changes in the aftermath of the election because of the possibility that courts determine some processes to be improper. Republican legislators mostly plan to wait and see what the courts say and consider any changes after election results are certified and official.
