Editor's note: This story has been updated to correct information about changes in Virginia laws.
This is the seventh in a series of articles examining changes to voting laws in every state.
The ongoing election evolution in the United States, while in large part catalyzed by the Covid-19 pandemic, has been building momentum for years.
Many states were already undergoing major overhauls to their election systems leading up to the 2020 election, even before the pandemic gripped the nation. And in the aftermath of the presidential contest, states have doubled down on voting reforms.
To provide a comprehensive analysis of the voting law changes in every state and Washington, D.C., since 2019, The Fulcrum compiled data from the Voting Rights Lab, the National Conference for State Legislatures, the Brennan Center for Justice, and state statutes and constitutions. This sixth installment focuses on the four reliably Democratic states and the District of Columbia. The next part will round out the blue state report.
In recent years, Democrats have held the governor’s mansion and both chambers of the legislature in New Jersey, New Mexico, Rhode Island and Virginia (although Republicans won all of the top executive offices and control of the House in Virginia’s 2021 elections). Of these four states, Virginia made the most extensive changes to its election laws, followed by New Jersey. The other two states made few permanent changes over the past three years.
The chart below provides an overview of how voting practices have changed or remained the same in these states over the past two years. A more detailed explanation of each state's changes follows.
More from Election Evolution:
How blue states have overhauled their election systems, Part I
How the 5 most populous states have overhauled their election systems
How the 5 vote-by-mail states have overhauled their election systems
How 5 swing states have overhauled their election systems
How the 4 early primary states have overhauled their election systems
How 5 Southern states have overhauled their election systems
New Jersey
Not only do Democrats control the “trifecta” (the governor’s mansion and both chambers of the Legislature), but for the time in state history there are now more registered Democrats than unaffiliated voters.
Over the past three years, those Democratic leaders have pushed through numerous changes to the election laws and procedures.
In 2020, the state enacted a “ballot curing” law to support the growth in voting by mail. Voters can access a confidential, free system to see whether their absentee ballot was accepted for counting. The measure also states that mail-in ballots cannot be rejected for a physical defect. County boards of election must record the rejection of a voter’s ballot and notify them within 24 hours of the decision to reject the ballot. The voter would have up to 48 hours prior to the date of final certification to provide a fix for their ballot via a “cure form.”
A 2019 bill removed a prohibition on voting for people who have been convicted of crimes but are on parole or probation. Another bill, enacted in 2021, prohibited prison gerrymandering — the practice of counting prison inmates where they are incarcerated, rather than their home addresses, for the purposes of redistricting — for federal, county, and municipal districts. Under the previous law, prison gerrymandering had been ended only for state legislative districts.
There were also several minor legislative changes enacted since 2019:
- In 2021, the state made permanent an in-person early voting system, with voting windows varying based on the type of election.
- The deadline for receipt of mailed-in ballots and certification of elections was extended in 2020.
- Another 2020 law requires county boards of election to establish ballot drop boxes in each county at least 45 days before election.
- That same year, the state enacted a law that allows for electronic signatures for all candidate, recall, initiative, and referendum petitions while New Jersey remains in a state of emergency.
- A 2019 law granted permanent vote-by-mail registration to voters who filed to vote by that method from 2016 to 2018.
New Jersey was among the states that switched to a primarily all-mail election during 2020, in response to the pandemic. Gov. Phil Murphy announced in early 2021 that the state would return to in-person voting.
New Mexico
New Mexico has been a reliably blue state since 1992, although George W. Bush eked out a win during his 2004 re-election campaign.
The state made temporary election changes during the pandemic. However, over the last few years, the Legislature only passed one significant, permanent measure for elections taking place during non-emergency times: the enactment of same-day voter registration in 2019.
In April 2021, the Legislature created new rules for polling places on American Indian lands, some of which are only for periods of declared emergencies, including:
- Any closing or consolidation of polling places on Native American lands or changes to the days or times when voting is allowed require the consent of Native governments.
- Under certain parameters, the county clerk must open an Election Day polling place on Native lands, and possibly provide an alternate voting location.
During non-emergency times, the bill also specifies that the elimination or consolidation of a polling place on Native land would require a written agreement from the Native nation, tribe or pueblo on which the polling place is located.
Rhode Island
Rhode Island government has been predominantly led by the Democratic Party since the Great Depression, and the party currently holds the trifecta.
In the past three years, the General Assembly has made a few changes to election laws and procedures. The majority have been relatively minor tweaks For example, in 2020 the state approved a process by which voters can register and cast emergency mail ballots on the same day.
Other changes, all enacted in 2019, include:
- A law provides that a voter may use proof of identity even if it has expired no more than six months prior to the date of voting.
- The state established 7 a.m. as the uniform time to open polling places and declared that all ballots cast by military and civilian citizens residing outside the U.S. will be counted when received by 4 p.m. on the third day after the primary or the seventh day after the general election.
- Rhode Island extended the absentee ballot deadline for military voters.
- Voters who make a mark, rather than provide a signature, can provide proof of identity without need for an affidavit by election supervisors.
- The state loosened the rules for primary voting by passing a law that allows unaffiliated voters to participate in party primary.
Virginia
State lawmakers and Gov. Ralph Northam, who have enjoyed unified Democratic control but will give way to Republicans in 2022, enacted sweeping election reform legislation this year. The new laws focus on increasing access to the polls, specifically for historically marginalized groups.
This year, Northam signed the Voting Rights Act of Virginia, which provides protection against voter suppression and discrimination. It requires local officials to seek pre-approval for any voting changes and allows individuals to sue on the basis of voter suppression. The bill also creates the Voter Outreach and Education Fund to educate voters on their rights.
Virginia also implemented several measures to expand mail voting accessibility. The list of acceptable reasons for requesting an absentee ballot was eliminated so anyone can vote by mail. First-time voters are no longer required to vote in person, and voters may also cast emergency ballots through a designated representative if they are injured or ill on Election Day. Furthermore, the early voting period was extended to include Sundays.
Additionally, the state adopted a 45-day window for no-excuse absentee voting and established a permanent absentee list, which allows voters to sign-up only once to receive mail-in before every election.
Accommodations for voters with disabilities were also approved. For example, election officials are now required to provide screen reader assistive technology for voters with a visual impairment. Officials are also required to provide an outer return envelope that includes a tactile marking that identifies it as such. Ballots may no longer be rejected due to the placement of a voter’s signature or address.
Finally, the possession of a firearm is prohibited within 40 feet of any entrance of a polling place except by police officers and security guards. The ban is in force from an hour before the polling place’s opening until an hour after closing, and it applies during the early voting period as well..
Other recent voting changes include:
- Same-day voter registration and automatic voter registration are allowed.
- Voters are also no longer required to present a photo ID at the polls. A valid student photo identification card issued by any institution of higher education may also be used as a form of identification.
- Election day is designated as a state holiday.
- The governor is allowed to authorize an extension to the deadline for online voter registration in the event of a malfunction/issue. This extension also applies to in-person and mail voting.
- County election officials must designate an absentee ballot drop-off location at multiple locations at least 55 days before Election Day.
- Officials must verify absentee ballots upon receipt and contact any absentee voter who returns their ballot by the Friday before Election Day with an issue that could lead to the ballot's rejection.
- The state must provide prepaid return postage for absentee ballots.
- Election officials cannot reject a ballot due to an unsealed envelope or if it is missing the full name or date.
- A person at least 16 years of age may now register to vote.
- Authorities are permitted to begin processing absentee ballots by noon on Election Day. Existing law allowed authorities to start at 3 p.m.
- All voters are permitted to use curbside voting during a declared state of emergency due to Covid-19. Existing law only permitted voters with disabilities or who were 65+ to use curbside voting.
- Election officials cannot void an absentee ballot due to a missing witness signature if the ballot was cast during a declared state of emergency
- Cities and counties may work with a third party for the printing, assembly, and mailing of absentee ballots.
Children watch a July Fourth Parade along the Walkway of Heroes and Independence Avenue on July 04, 2026 in Tappan, New York.
The Great American Grumpfest
Our nation’s 250th birthday party didn’t feel especially patriotic and wasn’t as much fun as the 200th anniversary was.
President Trump, who did his best to co-opt our holiday for his personal aggrandizement, was a major reason. The party he threw in Washington, D.C., was crankier than uplifting, and less about celebrating our shared past and a promising future than about reminding us how far we have strayed from our founders’ plan to create a republic that future Americans would keep in good working order.
Credit Trump this much. He has a singular gift for picking at scabs that other politicians would rather ignore and pushing us into reckonings we don’t need.
The thing is, Americans have seen all this before. Sometimes the makeover we were encouraged to undertake was more conservative, sometimes more liberal. Whatever direction we were pushing, however, the reckoning we had in mind this time had to be more forthright and the conclusion more definitive than it was the last time.
Our current discontents, the ones behind the reckoning President Trump has been trying to inspire, are not trivial. Included among them are immigration, birthright citizenship, exploding healthcare costs, election rigging, a gag-inducing national debt, how we educate our children, too many genders, racial differences we can’t move past, a lopsided economy that favors more well-off Americans, and historic levels of political corruption and graft. Add to these the several foreign adventures he has pushed us into or is anxious to undertake, and you have the makings of a national headache the likes of which we haven’t had in half a century.
All the elbow-throwing and overheated rhetoric we’re using today have begun to look almost normal in all the ways that bickering neighbors and feuding family members appear normal. But they have also made us look mean-spirited and have portrayed our differences as irreconcilable. To ourselves, of course, but also to many people outside the United States who might be forgiven for turning their heads and not looking at the national car wreck we Americans show no interest in avoiding.
The good news, as I suggested above, is that Americans have had a great deal of practice dealing with challenges and national car wrecks like these.
This essay begins to lay out the reasons why.
By way of illustration, we have our seemingly insatiable demand for more bad news about race in America.
Sixty years after being released from the legal constrictions that bedeviled both white and black Americans, many white people have come to believe the color that used to make them unassailable is now a sign of a moral inferiority born of a racial animus they can never wash off. Many black people, on the other hand, are insisting that America is as hopelessly stacked against them as the formerly unassailable white people’s ancestors used to tell their black ones.
The result is that many people today are buying into racist nightmares and mumbo jumbo that their black and white ancestors worked hard and effectively to put in each other’s heads.
This might be dismissed as crazy behavior if it weren’t so important to rituals Americans have long used to express their deepest fears about each other while figuring out what move they can make that won’t end with their world crashing down on everybody’s head.
Unfortunately, the kind of cultural sleight of hand we have used to ramp up our racial differences has been appropriated by people who have many other cultural fears and unresolved differences with each other. Their clumsy but culturally prescribed missteps are making all these other issues look as irremediable as our racial problems.
A good place to start an answer to how we back away from ledges is Alexis de Tocqueville’s writing on early-19th-century American democracy. He had an optimistic take on Americans’ unscripted displays of public bravado, recrimination, and payback.
For him, these were occasions when people tried to mitigate the effects of the unfair hand they were dealing someone else or had themselves been dealt by behaving in ways quite at odds with how they would otherwise be expected to act. These inversions of what Tocqueville called “the natural order of conscience” presented themselves as a loud but culturally muted challenge to the hypocrisies that people had built into the world they’d made together.
One of his favorite illustrations of early-American hypocrisy involved slave masters sleeping with their less-than-worthy slaves. To the best of my knowledge, he didn’t pick up on all the ways that slaves messed with their owners. Their well-chronicled and quiet resistance showed that even severely ill-treated people can exercise more control over their lives than outsiders appreciate.
Be that as it may, such inversions of a people’s “natural order of conscience” make a good public show of them wrestling with demons they can’t or may not want to shake off, but in any case, are nowhere close to figuring out how to cast out.
Implicit in these disruptions was the discomforting idea that people might flip the entire script and turn the world on its head in more permanent ways. That kind of flipping worked out better for us in our revolution against England than in our Civil War. These events taught us the value of stepping back from historically unprecedented ledges.
Americans of late have been giving loud expression to a long list of things they don’t like about each other and the last makeover they started but didn’t finish a half-century ago. The outcome of our fights today will be as revealing as they are embarrassing to everyone who imagined they could recast our country in a way that privileged their favorite kind of Americans.
Their disappointment with the accommodations they strike will be palpable, but the middling results they achieve with all their pushing and shoving won’t be anything they can’t live with.
Anthropologists who have written about such moments in other cultures less “advanced” than our own show that people find ways to work around their seemingly irreconcilable differences without ever fully resolving them. Indeed, the patches and repairs people make have the unheralded effect of reinforcing rather than undermining the legitimacy of the practices and values they thought were fundamentally flawed.
For example…
White guilt and black pessimism do more good than putting cash into the pockets of professional shamers and handwringers. They give the rest of us who don’t feel guilty or powerless more time to make the world less racially unequal. Good news.
Regarding illegal immigration, the entrance requirements for future immigrants will remain stringent. Americans will applaud the continued detention and deportation of the few illegal immigrants who commit serious crimes. Good news.
All the people who came to the United States without being legally vetted and were locked up for a time will be released in numbers small enough to avoid serious media attention. Along with the several million other good people who snuck in but avoided capture, the former detainees will go to school, find gainful employment, pay their taxes, and stay out of trouble. Many will eventually become citizens. Good news.
Investigations into election tampering and Donald Trump’s 2020 presidential loss will come to an unceremonious conclusion the day after his second term ends. Many Americans will grumble about this, but there will also be some quiet partying, too. Good and bad news.
Congressional hearings into all the grifting accomplished by people tied to the Trump administration will end without anyone having to pay a dime back to the American taxpayers. Bad news, we’ll learn to live with.
New laws and regulations will be created in the hope that the kind of corruption practiced by President Trump will not be repeated for another 250 years. Good news, I hope we’ll live long enough to enjoy.
Show trials for people who allegedly vandalized the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool, if they happen, will get big television viewer ratings. Good news.
Trials for pardoned Capitol insurrectionists who committed serious crimes after their release should get more attention, but won’t. Bad news.
We will continue to hear nothing from most of the people who were pardoned for crimes they committed in the insurrection at the Capitol on January 6, 2021. They will keep their mouths shut and their heads down for the rest of their life. Good news.
The gold-gilded ornaments that Donald Trump had plastered all over the White House will be shipped to Mar-a-Lago, where the former president will sell them on eBay. Fun news.
American taxpayers end up paying for most of the new East Wing, the removal of the miniature gladiatorial arena that was built behind the White House, and the restoration of the White House rose garden. Bad news.
The Triumphal Arch was never built. Good news.
Trad wives and gay couples raise perfectly lovely children. Good but unsurprising news.
Trans men and women learn that most Americans can’t figure out who they used to be. No one gives a second thought to their use of “family bathrooms” or “unisex bathrooms” in public settings, businesses, and schools. Communities will sponsor athletic teams that have trans boys and girls just to show they can. Good news.
Budget deficits will be kicked down the road for someone else’s children to pay down. Bad news.
Federal agencies that had their budgets and employee ranks slashed during President Trump’s second term are getting some of the money and lost positions back. Good news.
Elite universities will buy their way out of DEI purgatory by competing for conservative scholars whose inflated salaries dwarf those of their liberal colleagues, who will think about suing their institutions for reverse discrimination but won’t be able to figure out who would pay for it or care. More fun news.
Okay. I’ve probably missed some ways that Americans will step back from the ledges they have been making noises about leaping off. But to the extent that my predictions pan out, the best and most important moral of the stories about us stepping away is this: everything we lost and took back, or had returned to us, will have happened without our government collapsing, civic traditions crumbling, or our people beating each other up.
The reason why is that the differences Americans have with each other really weren’t as irreconcilable as we made them out to be. The empty-sounding bromide that Americans have more that unites us than divides us turns out to be true, not just metaphorically but in fact.
Now that is really something to celebrate.
Daniel J. Monti (danieljmonti.com) is Professor of Sociology at Saint Louis University and the author of American Democracy and Disconsent: Liberalism and Illiberalism in Ferguson, Charlottesville, Black Lives Matter, and the Capitol Insurrection.