The Fulcrum is debuting a new feature, summarizing the latest legislative activity affecting voting and elections. This weekly update is powered by the Voting Rights Lab. Sign up for VRL’s weekly newsletter here.
The Voting Rights Lab is tracking 2,418 bills so far this session, with 561 bills that tighten the rules governing voter access or election administration and 1,083 bills that expand the rules.
The biggest actions took place in Arizona, where the Senate passed a bill that would require documentary proof of citizenship for voter registration, sending it to the governor for signature. Kentucky enacted a law prohibiting private funding for elections. And the U.S. Supreme Court struck another blow against the Voting Rights Act, throwing out state legislative districts in Wisconsin.
Looking ahead: The Georgia Senate Ethic Committee is taking public comment on the elections omnibus. The latest amended adjournment resolution for Georgia provides that the final legislative day is April 4.
Here are the details:
Georgia election officials oppose elections omnibus. A number of election officials have spoken out in opposition of the elections omnibus, identifying the authority it gives to the Georgia Bureau of Investigation to initiate election investigations as the most troubling aspect of the bill. Under current law, the secretary of state’s office and State Election Board have jurisdiction over election investigations. H.B. 1464 would also allow for public ballot inspections, limit private donations for election administration, establish restrictive chain of custody requirements for ballots (voted and unvoted), and reduce the minimum number of voting booths that counties must offer on Election Day. The bill is scheduled to be heard by the Senate Ethics Committee on Monday.
Arizona voter registration bill advances through the Senate. H.B. 2492, a bill that would require documentary proof of citizenship for voter registration, passed the Senate and is headed to Gov. Doug Ducey’s desk. Meanwhile, H.B. 2289 passed the Senate Government Committee. Among its provisions, this highly restrictive piece of legislation would eliminate in-person early voting and no-excuse mail voting and would prohibit the use of electronic tabulators, requiring election officials to count all ballots by hand. Last week was the final week for committees to meet except the appropriations and rules committees. Members may offer additional strikers – proposals to delete all of the bill text and substitute with new language – on bills that will be heard in appropriations committees this week.
Missouri House committee hears bill requiring hand tabulation and video surveillance. The Missouri House Elections and Elected Officials Committee heard H.B. 2633, a bill requiring all ballots to be counted by hand with video surveillance. This bill would prohibit the use of electronic voting systems, including electronic tabulators, and would require paper ballots and hand tabulation in all races beginning in January 2023. All testimony provided was opposed to the bill. The committee did not vote on the bill following the hearing. Prohibiting electronic tabulators is a trend VRL has seen emerge this year, with 12 bills introduced in six states in January and February.
Connecticut pandemic excuse passes the General Assembly. Legislation that would expand existing excuses to vote absentee has passed both chambers of the legislature and will head to the governor for signature. This legislation would allow voters who are concerned about their health or the health of their family members, caretakers, and those who will be absent from their municipality to vote at any point during voting hours.
Wisconsin legislative districts in doubt. The U.S. Supreme Court threw out state legislative districts in Wisconsin, arguing that a Republican justice on the Wisconsin Supreme Court had created a “racial gerrymander” in approving maps that added another state assembly district with a majority of Black voters. The Wisconsin Supreme Court must now revisit the maps, likely before April 15.
Kentucky bill prohibiting private funding for elections, including most in-kind donations, becomes law without governor’s signature. Kentucky’s H.B. 301 became law without Gov. Andy Beshear’s signature last week. Bills restricting or prohibiting states from accepting private grants to help fund elections became a legislative trend last year, with 11 states passing this type of legislation. The trend is continuing this year, with five states passing similar legislation so far in 2022. The new Kentucky law is one of the more extreme versions of this bill in that it prohibits nearly all monetary or in-kind donations.
Eric Trump, the newly appointed ALT5 board director of World Liberty Financial, walks outside of the NASDAQ in Times Square as they mark the $1.5- billion partnership between World Liberty Financial and ALT5 Sigma with the ringing of the NASDAQ opening bell, on Aug. 13, 2025, in New York City.
Why does the Trump family always get a pass?
Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche joined ABC’s “This Week” on Sunday to defend or explain a lot of controversies for the Trump administration: the Epstein files release, the events in Minneapolis, etc. He was also asked about possible conflicts of interest between President Trump’s family business and his job. Specifically, Blanche was asked about a very sketchy deal Trump’s son Eric signed with the UAE’s national security adviser, Sheikh Tahnoon.
Shortly before Trump was inaugurated in early 2025, Tahnoon invested $500 million in the Trump-owned World Liberty, a then newly launched cryptocurrency outfit. A few months later, UAE was granted permission to purchase sensitive American AI chips. According to the Wall Street Journal, which broke the story, “the deal marks something unprecedented in American politics: a foreign government official taking a major ownership stake in an incoming U.S. president’s company.”
“How do you respond to those who say this is a serious conflict of interest?” ABC host George Stephanopoulos asked.
“I love it when these papers talk about something being unprecedented or never happening before,” Blanche replied, “as if the Biden family and the Biden administration didn’t do exactly the same thing, and they were just in office.”
Blanche went on to boast about how the president is utterly transparent regarding his questionable business practices: “I don’t have a comment on it beyond Trump has been completely transparent when his family travels for business reasons. They don’t do so in secret. We don’t learn about it when we find a laptop a few years later. We learn about it when it’s happening.”
Sadly, Stephanopoulos didn’t offer the obvious response, which may have gone something like this: “OK, but the president and countless leading Republicans insisted that President Biden was the head of what they dubbed ‘the Biden Crime family’ and insisted his business dealings were corrupt, and indeed that his corruption merited impeachment. So how is being ‘transparent’ about similar corruption a defense?”
Now, I should be clear that I do think the Biden family’s business dealings were corrupt, whether or not laws were broken. Others disagree. I also think Trump’s business dealings appear to be worse in many ways than even what Biden was alleged to have done. But none of that is relevant. The standard set by Trump and Republicans is the relevant political standard, and by the deputy attorney general’s own account, the Trump administration is doing “exactly the same thing,” just more openly.
Since when is being more transparent about wrongdoing a defense? Try telling a cop or judge, “Yes, I robbed that bank. I’ve been completely transparent about that. So, what’s the big deal?”
This is just a small example of the broader dysfunction in the way we talk about politics.
Americans have a special hatred for hypocrisy. I think it goes back to the founding era. As Alexis de Tocqueville observed in “Democracy In America,” the old world had a different way of dealing with the moral shortcomings of leaders. Rank had its privileges. Nobles, never mind kings, were entitled to behave in ways that were forbidden to the little people.
In America, titles of nobility were banned in the Constitution and in our democratic culture. In a society built on notions of equality (the obvious exceptions of Black people, women, Native Americans notwithstanding) no one has access to special carve-outs or exemptions as to what is right and wrong. Claiming them, particularly in secret, feels like a betrayal against the whole idea of equality.
The problem in the modern era is that elites — of all ideological stripes — have violated that bargain. The result isn’t that we’ve abandoned any notion of right and wrong. Instead, by elevating hypocrisy to the greatest of sins, we end up weaponizing the principles, using them as a cudgel against the other side but not against our own.
Pick an issue: violent rhetoric by politicians, sexual misconduct, corruption and so on. With every revelation, almost immediately the debate becomes a riot of whataboutism. Team A says that Team B has no right to criticize because they did the same thing. Team B points out that Team A has switched positions. Everyone has a point. And everyone is missing the point.
Sure, hypocrisy is a moral failing, and partisan inconsistency is an intellectual one. But neither changes the objective facts. This is something you’re supposed to learn as a child: It doesn’t matter what everyone else is doing or saying, wrong is wrong. It’s also something lawyers like Mr. Blanche are supposed to know. Telling a judge that the hypocrisy of the prosecutor — or your client’s transparency — means your client did nothing wrong would earn you nothing but a laugh.
Jonah Goldberg is editor-in-chief of The Dispatch and the host of The Remnant podcast. His Twitter handle is @JonahDispatch.