Weeks before the election, and some states still don't know who's allowed to vote

You're reading Route Fifty's State and Local Roundup. Subscribe here to get this update in your inbox every Saturday.

The ground has shifted considerably since the last presidential election in 2020, when it comes to rules for who can vote, how they can vote and how their ballots will be counted. But even with Election Day just a few weeks away—and people already sending in mail-in ballots and early voting sites opening in some states—those rules are still in flux.

A flurry of lawsuits, two hurricanes that hit the South in recent weeks and even last-minute changes by elections administrators have all added to the last-minute uncertainty.

Four years after Donald Trump lost the presidential election to Joe Biden by 74 electoral votes (and 7 million people in the popular vote), the “Big Lie” promoted by Trump that he won the election continues to shape state and local voting policies. The controversy over Trump’s loss spurred many Republican-leaning states to restrict access to the ballot box, with 29 states imposing tighter rules on voting over the last four years, according to the Brennan Center for Justice. In fact, nine states enacted restrictive voting laws just this year.

“This fall, in more than half the states, millions of voters will face hurdles to vote that they have never before encountered in a presidential election,” the liberal group wrote.

A Blizzard of Lawsuits

But Republicans are also working to impose tighter voting rules through the courts. 

According to USA Today, party officials have created a blizzard of legal activity in the weeks and months leading up to November. “The Republican National Committee has filed more than 100 lawsuits,” wrote reporters Bart Jansen and Aysha Bagchi, “including some aiming to ensure that absentee ballots are counted only if they arrive by Election Day, that mailed ballots meet requirements such as having dates on them; and that noncitizens—who are legally barred from voting in federal elections—are unable to vote.”

In the last week, Republicans have launched three more challenges over voting of citizens living abroad, including members of the military, in the key swing states of Michigan, North Carolina and Pennsylvania. The Republicans said the states did not do enough to verify the identities of people requesting the ballots. The lawsuits come after Trump alleged, without evidence, that Democrats “are getting ready to CHEAT” using a decades-old law that allows Americans to vote overseas, notes NBC News.

State officials in each of the states defended their rules.

“The plaintiffs have challenged a state law that allows U.S. citizens living abroad to vote in North Carolina elections when these voters’ only residential connection to a U.S. state is through their parents’ former residence in North Carolina. Otherwise, these U.S. citizens have no other way to vote in U.S. elections,” explained Patrick Gannon, a spokesperson for North Carolina's bipartisan State Board of Elections. “This lawsuit was filed after voting had already begun in North Carolina for the general election. The time to challenge the rules for voter eligibility is well before an election, not after votes have already been cast.”

Voter ID Laws Continue to Cause Controversy

North Carolina, in fact, is being buffeted by many forces as it heads into the November election, reports WRAL. Some of the most potentially far-reaching questions concern the roll-out of the state’s 2018 voter ID law, which requires voters to show official identification before voting

Election administrators are waiting on a federal judge’s decision about whether the law is valid. The NAACP challenged the law in federal court, claiming it is racially discriminatory, because Black and Hispanic voters are more than twice as likely to lack a qualifying ID than white voters. But Republican lawmakers argued that the law doesn’t discriminate because it also makes IDs free to obtain and includes exceptions for voters who can’t easily obtain one.

The federal lawsuit is the latest chapter in a long fight over voter ID in North Carolina, dating back to a federal appeals court’s rejection of a 2013 law that contained voter ID and other voting restrictions because the judges found that the legislation’s provisions “target African-Americans with almost surgical precision.” Republican lawmakers passed a new version of the law in 2018, but it had been on hold until recently by courts.

That means that courts and election officials are still trying to sort out how to roll out the most recent law. For example, the State Board of Elections voted 3-2 in August to allow University of North Carolina students to use their digital student ID to vote, as Route Fifty’s Chris Teale reported. But a state appeals court reversed that decision just a few weeks later, without immediately explaining its rationale.

Nationally, voter ID laws have become more common in recent years, with 36 states now requiring some form of identification to cast a ballot, reported Stateline this summer. Nevada could soon join the ranks of states with voter ID, as voters will decide whether to adopt a voter ID standard in a ballot question next month.

But those rules can have unexpected consequences, even for proponents, as one lawmaker in Ohio discovered. After Ohio Republicans approved changes in 2023 to make the state’s voter ID law stricter, the number of provisional ballots that were rejected for lack of proper identification jumped from 0.6% to 8.2%, according to the Cleveland Plain Dealer.

“If the rejection rate remains as high as it has been over the past four statewide elections,” wrote Jake Zuckerman, a state politics reporter, “elections officials will discount thousands more in the November balloting, which include presidential, congressional, statehouse, judicial, and local races, plus a proposed constitutional amendment.”

“The data were striking enough,” Zuckerman added, “that Rep. Thomas Hall, a Madison Township Republican who sponsored the elections crackdown, expressed remorse in an interview Thursday and called the numbers a ‘problem’ he didn’t intend.”

Meanwhile, California Gov. Gavin Newsom, a Democrat, signed a law last month to bar local governments from enacting their own voter ID laws. The measure is squarely aimed at Huntington Beach in Orange County, where conservatives took control of the city council in 2022. Voters there approved a voter ID law this spring (along with a ban on Pride flags on city property), but the state attorney general sued to block it. The law was meant to bolster the case that the state policy trumped the local initiative, but Huntington Beach Mayor Gracey Van Der Mark is apparently unswayed. “The state cannot pass any laws that strip us of our constitutional rights, so that law does not apply to us or affect our new election laws,” she wrote in a text message to LAist.

Hurricanes' Aftermath

The devastation of Hurricanes Helene and Milton have scrambled plans for administering elections in hard-hit areas, although not as extensively as some Democrats had hoped.

North Carolina’s Republican-led legislature unanimously passed a measure Wednesday that makes it easier for people in the storm-ravaged western part of the state to vote. The Trump campaign had pushed for the changes, because the affected area of the swing state is predominantly Republican. Election boards in 25 counties now have the authority to modify voting hours, combine precincts, change voting sites and allow absentee ballots to be returned to any voting site, Reuters reports. Displaced voters could even be allowed to vote in a different county from where they live.

Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis signed an executive order to let counties impacted by Helene to consolidate voting centers and relocate polling places if existing ones have been destroyed. He also loosened rules for distributing mail-in ballots.

But voting rights groups failed to convince the Republican governor or a federal judge to extend the state’s voter registration deadline, which was Oct. 7, just days before Milton made landfall. The advocates said evacuation orders and hurricane preparation forced them to cancel voter registration drives and likely prevented residents from registering on their own.

“This year, tens of thousands of Florida residents—forced to choose between safety and exercising their fundamental right—have been denied the opportunity to register to vote,” they said in a complaint.

A federal judge in Georgia also declined to reopen voter registration after Helene caused extensive damage there. U.S. District Judge Eleanor Ross said the groups bringing the lawsuit didn’t prove any of their members were harmed, and said no state laws allow officials like Gov. Brian Kemp or Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger to open up the rolls again.

“I don’t think we had even one voter who had been harmed or would likely be harmed by failure to register to vote,” Ross said.

Keep reading as there’s more news to use below, and if you don’t already and would prefer to get this roundup in your inbox, you can subscribe to this newsletter here. We’ll see you next week.

News to Use

Trends, Common Challenges, Cool Ideas, FYIs and Notable Events

Lead Pipes
Biden sets 10-year deadline for U.S. cities to replace lead pipes nationwide. The new Environmental Protection Agency rule is the strongest overhaul of lead-in-water standards in roughly three decades. Cities will have 10 years to remove all lead pipes. In making the announcement, President Joe Biden said more than 9 million lead pipes remain in use. The EPA estimates the stricter standard will prevent up to 900,000 infants from having low birth weight and avoid up to 1,500 premature deaths a year from heart disease. To help communities comply, the agency is making available an additional $2.6 billion for drinking water infrastructure through the bipartisan infrastructure law. A limited number of cities with large volumes of lead pipes may be given a longer timeframe to meet the new standard.

Abortion
The Georgia Supreme Court reinstates the state’s six-week abortion ban. The ruling comes just a week after a trial court struck down the 2019 law, saying it was unconstitutional. The lower court ruling had temporarily allowed legal abortion up to 22 weeks of pregnancy. Some abortion providers in the state had resumed offering them. Monday’s decision means the ban will remain in effect while the case challenging Georgia’s law makes its way through the state court system. The change comes as Georgia’s abortion ban has become a critical issue in the presidential election, especially after ProPublica reported the cases of two women who died in the state after they couldn’t access legal abortions. 

IVF
U.S. Supreme Court won’t hear appeal from Alabama IVF clinics. The U.S. Supreme Court Monday declined to review an Alabama case that sparked a national debate over the availability of in vitro fertilization (IVF) treatments. The Center for Reproductive Medicine and Mobile Infirmary Medical Center filed a petition in August challenging a February Alabama Supreme Court ruling that frozen embryos were minor children under an 1872 law. The decision forced several clinics to temporarily halt services and sparked widespread criticism. The IVF clinics asked the nation’s high court to reverse the ruling, arguing that it upends over a century of legal interpretation and threatens the future of reproductive services in the state.

Elections
How do you vote amid the hurricane damage? States are learning as they go. Hurricane season has not only wreaked havoc on people’s lives throughout much of the country, but could also make it more difficult for voters to cast their ballots in hard-hit regions. Election officials in states regularly affected by hurricane season have considerable experience ensuring residents can vote following natural disasters, but those in other parts of the country less accustomed to the destruction this year are learning as they go.

This proud liberal city is throwing out its entire government. Portland has endured more than 100 days of often-violent protests, a fentanyl and homelessness crisis, a pandemic—and, in arguably the nation’s boldest progressive policy experiment in recent history—decriminalization of all drugs. This November, Portland is undertaking one more chaotic act, reports Politico. In a sign of either hope or desperation, voters decided to throw out their entire government structure and replace it with a weaker mayor, expanded city council and ranked choice voting.

Threats to courthouse employees investigated following Tina Peters sentencing. Former Mesa County Clerk and Recorder Tina Peters of Colorado was found guilty in August for several crimes related to an elections security breach. She was sentenced to nine years in prison. After the sentencing, courthouse staff received unspecified threats and many far right personalities criticized the result online, according to Colorado Newsline. 

Social Media
TikTok sued by 14 states over alleged harm to kids. Led by California and New York, the states are suing TikTok for allegedly duping the public about the safety of the popular video app, claiming it was deliberately designed to keep young people hooked on the service. The lawsuits, filed separately on Tuesday in 13 states and the District of Columbia, argue TikTok has violated consumer protection laws and contributed to a teen mental health crisis. The bipartisan group of attorneys general is seeking to force TikTok to change product features that they argue are manipulative and harm teens. The states are also asking courts to impose financial penalties on the company. It is the latest headache for TikTok, which is trying to fend off a U.S. ban of the app slated to start Jan. 19, unless the company severs ties with ByteDance, its China-based parent company. Last week, Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton separately sued TikTok for sharing and selling minors’ personal information, violating a state law that seeks to protect children who are active on social media.

Finance
Denver’s affordable housing tax would make the city into an investment bank. If voters approve an affordable housing sales tax measure in the Nov. 5 election, Denver will be able to open a new in-house investment bank for affordable housing—one fed by the billions of dollars in revenue the new 0.5% tax increase will unleash in coming decades. By offering cheaper capital to developers, the city can require that more apartments be set aside for income-qualified tenants or set other conditions that help it meet its affordable housing goals. But several real estate professionals and observers question if Denver is ready to step into the gap by providing construction loans or becoming an equity investor in new projects.

Workforce
California could cut 10,000 unfilled state positions in new budget proposal. Gov. Gavin Newsom proposed cutting unfilled state positions in a revised budget plan he unveiled late last week. The cuts are set to start in the 2025-26 fiscal year and continue after that, the administration said. It projected the move would save the state roughly $762.5 million. “Those positions are being determined in real time at every agency and department,” he said during a presentation. The governor said his state staffing plan does not include furloughs, layoffs or wage cuts. The proposal is in response to a large state budget shortfall.

Disaster Recovery
Florida criminalized homelessness. Then came hurricanes Helene and Milton. Disaster relief for people who were homeless prior to a hurricane has always been lacking, as FEMA, the main federal agency tasked with providing aid, has a policy that explicitly excludes those unhoused people from most forms of help, including housing and direct assistance. These dynamics have grown more pressing as major hurricanes increase in frequency and the number of unsheltered Americans continues to grow.

Media
Political connections of local news owners spur suspicion, distrust. As the journalism industry shrinks and mainstream media outlets disappear, some of the websites that have filled the gap are run by politically connected editors and publishers and others with potentially hidden motives. Examples abound of New Jersey news sites whose owners have political connections they fail to divulge or even secretly exploit, which critics call “pink slime sites.”

Picture of the Week

A drone image shows the dome of Tropicana Field, which was torn open due to Hurricane Milton in St. Petersburg, Florida, on Oct. 10, 2024. Only a few panels of the roof—made of “6 acres of translucent, Teflon-coated fiberglass” and supported by cables connected by struts, and built to withstand winds of up to 115 mph, per the team—remained intact after the storm, the Tampa Bay Times reports. 

Government in Numbers

502

The number of days and counting since Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton last held a press conference—one of just two he has called in the last year and a half.

Email data obtained by the Nexstar Media Group through the Texas Public Information Act suggests the pattern of evasiveness extends to all communication with the press. Paxton’s press team has an extraordinarily low response rate to journalists’ inquiries. From March to September, the Attorney General’s Office received 2,722 emails to their “communications@oag.texas.gov” email account. In the same timeframe, that account sent eight emails—a sent/received ratio of 0.003%. Individual press staffers also show a low response rate. Communications Director Paige Willey received 3,470 emails in the same period. She sent 907 emails, suggesting a press response rate of less than 26%. Lead press secretary Jonathan Richie sent just 197 emails for the 2,112 he received, suggesting a response rate of less than 9%.