Democrats near the prize: Election-law overhauls in battleground states

Republicans are bracing for losses in what polls suggest will be a successful night for Democrats hoping to retake majorities in Congress. But they are also at risk of losing enough downballot races that control of the most critical swing states will move entirely to Democrats at a time when both parties are trying to rewrite election laws across the country.Democrats are defending their majorities in just three of the 15 state legislative chambers rated as competitive by the Center for Politics at the University of Virginia. Five chambers considered toss-ups are held by Republicans in key battleground states: the Arizona Senate, Arizona House, Michigan House, Pennsylvania Senate, and Wisconsin Assembly. In Minnesota, both legislative chambers are rated as toss-ups and are presently divided by just one seat each. The Minnesota House was split 67-67 until the end of the year’s legislative session, although Democrats technically hold a one-seat majority heading into Election Day after a Republican state lawmaker resigned in June and no special election was called to fill the vacancy. That means Minnesota Democrats could obtain a working trifecta by winning just one state legislative seat on Tuesday.Democrats in all those states have floated voting reforms to vote tabulation, voting eligibility, and mail-in ballot disqualifications.HERE ARE THE STATES WITH VOTER ID ON THE BALLOT THIS NOVEMBER“They want automatic voter registration. They want same-day voter registration. They want all-mail elections. They want vote harvesting,” said Jason Snead, executive director of the Honest Elections Project, an election integrity group. “They always dress this up as a question of access and making it easy to vote.”“But what they’re really trying to do is essentially build out a system where the laws of our elections fit hand-in-glove with the partisan get-out-the-vote operation that the Left has built,” Snead told the Washington Examiner. “And they have a whole army of activists. They have unions. And those folks are very good at turning out voters and turning out ballots, and that’s really the way the Left views this.”Republican attempts to pass national election reform with the SAVE America Act, which would have required people to provide documentary proof of citizenship to register to vote, failed this year when the Senate could not clear the 60-vote threshold needed to avoid a filibuster. Republicans only have a 53-seat majority in the upper chamber.An official ballot drop box stands in Eau Claire, Wis. on Wisconsin’s first day of early voting, Tuesday, Oct. 20, 2026. (AP Photo/Ellen Schmidt) A handful of GOP-controlled states managed to pass measures requiring citizenship verification this year in the absence of federal action. Florida, Mississippi, South Dakota, and Utah, each with GOP trifectas, became the latest states to pass proof-of-citizenship laws in 2026, according to a report released this week by the Honest Elections Project. Five more states have measures limiting eligibility for voting to U.S. citizens on the ballot next week, and one, Arizona, has a measure restricting voter registration to citizens. Other states have passed voter ID requirements, parameters for absentee voting, and limits on ballot drop boxes in the six years since the pandemic introduced widespread election changes.But Democrats could quickly erase reforms that Republican state lawmakers enacted recently if they flip state legislatures or win gubernatorial races in states where they already control the state legislature, as they are hoping to do in Nevada.“There’s no doubt that the Democrats will try to loosen things up and undo some of the reforms that Republicans have enacted in various states. There’s just no doubt,” Justin Riemer, president of legal nonprofit group Restoring Integrity and Trust in Elections, told the Washington Examiner.Any election reforms that state Democrats manage to pass over the next two years, such as expanded early voting windows, could prove more difficult for future Republican state legislatures to unwind.“These things, honestly, a lot of times have a one-way ratchet,” Riemer said. “They get enacted, and the optics of rolling these things back can at times be challenging.”The challenges go beyond the optics of taking away an expansion of voting accessibility once it’s in place. Litigants on the Left have had success in stopping or slowing Republican-led voting limits in the courts, even when those changes are as simple as removing dead or inactive voters from the rolls.“When and if Republicans regain control, any legislation they pass to reverse these damaging changes will face multiple lawsuits by well-funded, radical left-wing groups like the League of Women Voters, the NAACP, the ACLU, and others,” Hans von Spakovsky, senior legal fellow at the conservative Advancing American Freedom, told the Washington Examiner. “That doesn’t mean they won’t be successful, but it does mean they will face a long, expensive slog to get such reforms in place.”“And if their state’s attorney general is a Democrat, they can expect that attorney general to do everything possible to help those organizations and to sabotage the defense of those laws in litigation,” von Spakovsky added.Ballot harvesting, mail-in voting, and more Arizona Republicans passed a ballot harvesting ban in 2016 when they had control of both state legislative chambers and the governorship. Democrats fought for years to have the ban overturned in court, but in 2021, the Supreme Court upheld it on procedural grounds. Ballot harvesting is when third parties collect completed ballots in bulk and return them on behalf of the voters.Since then, state Democrats have repeatedly introduced legislation that would reverse the ballot-harvesting restriction.But Democrats have not had unified control of Arizona’s government since 1966. That could change after Tuesday, when Democrats are favored to retake both legislative chambers and hold the governorship.Ballot harvesting is just one of several practices that conservatives fear Democrats will enact in battleground states before the 2028 presidential election.In Pennsylvania, Democrats have proposed expanding early voting, mandating ballot drop boxes, and removing the requirement that voters write the date they cast their mail-in ballot on the ballot’s envelope. Under current law, many Pennsylvania counties reject ballots that don’t have a handwritten date, but others count them. Democrats have not had a trifecta in Pennsylvania since 1993.In Michigan, state Senate Democrats passed a bill that would require redistricting to prioritize racial minority voters, but it died in the GOP-controlled state House. In Arizona, Democrats in the legislative minority proposed expanding early voting and counting early ballots returned to the wrong county.In Wisconsin, Democrats introduced bills this year that would implement automatic voter registration and shorten the amount of time a voter must have lived at an address to be eligible to vote from four weeks to 10 days.Conservatives are particularly concerned about automatic voter registration, a relatively new practice first implemented by Oregon in 2016 that has since been adopted by 23 states and Washington, D.C.“Automatic registration results in noncitizens registering through the DMV or through other social service agencies, like Medicaid and that sort of thing,” Riemer said. He cited the example of New Jersey, where state officials recently removed roughly 6,600 noncitizens from their voter rolls after discovering a software glitch that had registered the noncitizens even after they disclosed that they did not have citizenship.2026 MIDTERM ELECTIONS LIVE UPDATES: LATEST NEWS, RESULTS AND ANALYSISCritics say that situation could belie a much bigger problem in states with automatic voter registration, because some states make little to no effort to verify whether someone is actually a citizen after they’ve checked a box affirming that they are.“This is a big priority of the Left. It’s basically universal voter registration. And the reality is, they set these processes up and they say they’re secure and that they’re actually designed to weed out noncitizens, but when they’re implemented, it’s very clear it doesn’t do that,” Riemer said. “Whether it’s Oregon, whether it’s California, or whether it’s New Jersey, and that’s going to be something they’re pushing for, because there’s a lot of groups on the Left that are putting a lot of money behind that.”Proponents of automatic voter registration say it helps more people have access to the ballot, and that modern software can easily screen out ineligible voters, such as noncitizens, before they’re automatically added to the rolls.But the extent of noncitizen voter registration is unclear. Thirty states have fought, so far successfully, against efforts by the Trump administration to check state voter rolls against federal citizenship databases. That includes California, which the Trump administration accuses of refusing to verify the citizenship of roughly 20,000 registered voters who U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services officials have identified as likely noncitizens.Democratic gains in battleground states next week could mean the Trump administration faces even more resistance to those efforts ahead of the next presidential election.“I certainly hope that everybody in those states is aware that the rules of 2028 are functionally being decided right now,” said Snead of the Honest Elections Project.Electoral College in jeopardy? A Democrat-led project nearly 20 years in the making could soon bear fruit if Republicans, and even some centrist Democrats, lose enough state legislative seats on Tuesday.The National Popular Vote Compact is a currently dormant agreement among states to award electoral votes in presidential elections to the winner of the national popular vote, not to the winner of each individual state in the compact. The Electoral College currently awards electoral votes to the winner of each state or, in the cases of Maine and Nebraska, splits them among the winners of congressional districts.The NPVC, which has been signed into law by 18 states and Washington, D.C., will take effect when 270 electoral votes, the number needed to win the presidency, are committed to the compact. Maryland became the first state to pass it in 2007, and since then, 222 electoral votes are represented by the states that have adopted it.Democrats could tip the balance of that number if they flip enough states this cycle, and that could plunge the country into uncharted legal and political waters.“There certainly is a real risk, more than there ever has been before,” Trent England, executive director of the pro-Electoral College group Save our States, told the Washington Examiner. “The states that have joined the compact have all been blue states, and the pressure comes not just from Democrats, but really, from the progressive wing of the Democratic Party, which seems poised to gain even more power in some of these state legislative Democratic caucuses.”“We’ve had some success with Democrats in the past, especially in states like Pennsylvania and Michigan, opposing NPV,” England added. “It just gets more difficult when there are more progressives, DSA members, in those caucuses and potentially in leadership.”Supporters of the NPVC argue that voters who live in battleground states get an outsize say in who becomes president, and that effectively dismantling the Electoral College will give equal weight to every vote.But its critics point to the moderating effect the Electoral College, which is outlined in the Constitution but not labeled as such, has on presidential politics. It forces candidates to compete for independent voters in a diverse group of states, rather than to try to rack up votes in big cities with mostly homogeneous political views.Legal experts have no consensus on whether the NPVC runs afoul of the Constitution.“It certainly falls in a gray area,” England said. “What I tell people is, the idea that states would give away their electoral votes is a concept so dumb that James Madison never worried about it.”“There’s nothing in the Constitution that says you can’t do that,” he added. “And so that is a concern.”If enough states move quickly to pass the NPVC in the next two years, courts may not have enough time to sort through the inevitable legal challenges before the next presidential election.“There’s always a risk in election law cases that you have courts try to punt and see what happens,” England said. “I think that would be our biggest concern.”And the end result of those court battles would likely leave millions of voters unsatisfied regardless of the outcome, Snead noted.ALASKA DEMOCRATS’ VOTING SCHEME SHOWS THEY THINK VOTERS ARE ‘STUPID’: SALENA ZITO“If we do wind up in a fight over NPV, then we have essentially created a dynamic where, no matter how that plays out, half the country will think that the 2028 presidential election is being stolen. It’s a question of by who,” he said. “One side will think they have rewritten rules successfully for ‘democracy,’ and the other side will say that they’re just trying to unconstitutionally seize power.”“That’s a very dangerous dynamic to be in.”