This weekly update summarizing legislative activity affecting voting and elections is powered by the Voting Rights Lab. Sign up for VRL’s weekly newsletter here.
The Voting Rights Lab is tracking 2,154 bills so far this session, with 575 bills that tighten the rules governing voter access or election administration and 1,028 bills that expand the rules.
Empire State lawmakers passed the New York John R. Lewis Voting Rights Act, legislation designed to prevent race- and language-based discriminatory election laws and procedures. This landmark legislation is now on the governor’s desk. In Arizona, two bills that would improve voter access are headed to the governor. One would ensure voters who receive, but do not cast, mail ballots are still able to vote in-person and another would require the Department of Game and Fish to provide voter registration services during licensure transactions. California’s Senate passed protections for election workers, sending the bill to the Assembly. After an Oklahoma bill to bifurcate state and federal elections passed in both chambers, only one ratified the conference committee version, meaning the bill will not make it to the governor's desk.
Looking ahead, Gov. Kathy Hochul may sign the New York Voting Rights Act this week.
Here are the details:
New York sends the John R. Lewis Voting Rights Act to the governor. This legislation would create legal protections to prevent race- and language-based discriminatory election laws, rules and practices. In certain instances, it would require changes to election rules be pre-approved – or precleared – before going into effect, to ensure they will not have a discriminatory impact. The bill would also create private rights of action to facilitate injunctive relief when a law is discriminatory, as well as require all key voting materials to be provided in various languages. This legislation is now available for the governor’s signature.
In addition to this landmark bill, the Legislature also sent the governor a bill to protect the registration records (including addresses) of survivors of sexual violence. Similar protections currently exist for domestic violence survivors.
In Arizona, bills that would allow more voters to cast regular in-person ballots and expand access to voter registration services head to the governor. Last week, the Arizona Senate concurred on two bills that are now headed to Gov. Doug Ducey. S.B. 1460 would ensure voters who receive mail ballots can still cast regular ballots in person, after first surrendering their early ballot. Under existing law, all such voters are required to vote using provisional ballots.
Also heading to the governor for signature is S.B. 1170, which would require the Department of Game and Fish to provide voter registration services to people applying for a hunting, fishing or trapping license.
Election worker protections clear one chamber of the California Legislature. S.B. 1131 would create an address confidentiality program to protect election workers who are under threat, provide funding for the program, and generally remove the names of precinct board members from public disclosure materials. The bill would also prohibit a person, business or association from publicly posting online the home address of a program participant in specifically defined situations. The Senate also sent S.B. 1480 to the Assembly; that bill would allow certain disabled voters to return their ballots electronically.
Oklahoma nearly creates parallel state and federal election systems. If Congress enacted a law similar to this session's John R. Lewis Voting Rights Act or the Freedom to Vote Act, it would have a substantial impact on aspects of Oklahoma elections because the Sooner State’s election laws are, in some respects, among the most restrictive in the nation. In response to the potential passage of such a federal law, the Legislature passed bills through both chambers that would have created one system for state elections and a parallel system for federal offices. Because the chambers passed different versions of the bill, a conference committee created a new, third version that was then adopted by the House. Ultimately, the Senate chose not to vote on the compromise measure before the session ended on May 27. As a result, the bill was not transmitted to the governor.
image of U.S. President Donald Trump is displayed on a digital billboard in Times Square in New York on April 8, 2026.
Trump is stuck between two realities. Neither serves the American people
Normally, I worry that events may overtake a column. But not so with the Iran war.
I don’t worry about running afoul of a headline or Truth Social post from the president because what is said about the situation is no longer very relevant to the reality.
On April 8, Nick Catoggio, my Dispatch colleague, dubbed an earlier stoppage with Iran “Schrödinger’s ceasefire.” This was a reference to the famous thought experiment by the physicist Erwin Schrödinger, who was trying to explain the weirdness of “superpositionality” in quantum physics. A cat in a box is both dead and alive at the same time until you open the box. Schrödinger meant to illustrate the absurdity of the idea that particles aren’t any one thing, but a “cloud of probabilities.”
The Trump administration is stuck in a word cloud of probabilities of his own making. The war is over. The war is on. The war isn’t a war. We have a deal, but we don’t have a deal, but we’re about to have a deal. We destroyed Iran’s military. No, we left it intact. We want regime change. No we don’t. We already accomplished it. We “obliterated” Iran’s nuclear program a year ago. We had to go to war in February to prevent nuclear war. The Strait of Hormuz is open, closed, or something in-between. No deal without “unconditional surrender.” Let’s make a deal!
This everything-all-at-once vibe can be disorienting, particularly since most Americans didn’t have a war with Iran on their bingo cards until the shooting had already started. President Trump didn’t prepare the country or consult with Congress beforehand because he thought it would all be a smashing success in a matter of weeks.
The miscalculation that started it all: killing Iran’s Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, and much of Iran’s senior leadership, on the first day of the war. To “the great proud people of Iran, I say tonight that the hour of your freedom is at hand,” Trump announced on Feb. 28. “When we are finished, take over your government. It will be yours to take. This will be probably your only chance for generations.”
I support regime change in Iran and shed no tears for Khamenei or his goons. But when you start a war by killing the regime’s top leaders, it’s not unreasonable for the remaining ones to conclude that you really intend regime change.
Khamenei was a murderous fanatic, but he was a fairly cautious one. He liked to threaten closing the Strait of Hormuz or attacking our regional allies, but he was reluctant to actually do it, fearing it would invite a regime change war. The mullahs and IRGC goons believed, not unreasonably, that if they lost their grip on power, they’d be lynched by the Iranian people they’ve brutalized for decades.
By starting with a regime change war, Trump removed any reason for the regime not to go for broke. When you have nothing to lose — particularly when you are a millenarian religious fanatic — a Persian Alamo strategy makes a lot of sense.
So Iran closed the Strait of Hormuz and attacked its neighbors.
But it turns out this wasn’t the Alamo. In the contest of wills, Trump blinked. The Iranian regime’s tolerance for punishment proved — so far — to be greater than Trump’s and that of our gulf allies. Militarily we could finish the job, but that would require ground troops and much greater economic turmoil. In a conflict Trump launched unilaterally without the prior support of Congress, NATO or the American people, Trump doesn’t have the political capital for that.
But that’s only half the problem. Trump wants the war over, but he doesn’t want to pay — militarily, economically, politically — what that would cost. So he wants to make a deal that ends it. But there is no deal available that wouldn’t come at an equally undesirable cost. Any deal that looks like what President Obama struck with the Iranians would be too embarrassing to bear. But the Iranians are convinced that they can get just such a deal, and they’re willing to drag things out as long as it takes.
The result: Trump’s in a box of his own making. He thinks he can talk his way out by simply asserting a reality that doesn’t exist. When the financial markets get nervous, he announces a breakthrough that is, at best, a possibility. When the Iranians agree to a deal that looks similar to one Obama might negotiate, Trump goes back to his threats.
It can’t go on forever. But I’m sure it’ll last until long after this column is forgotten.
Jonah Goldberg is editor-in-chief of The Dispatch and the host of The Remnant podcast. His Twitter handle is @JonahDispatch.