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 2,158 bills so far this session, with 574 bills that tighten the rules governing voter access or election administration and 1,029 bills that expand the rules.
A New Hampshire bill that would create a stricter voter ID law and establish a new system of provisional ballots took another step forward last week, and Rhode Island enacted the Let RI Vote Act, which allows all voters to cast a mail ballot with no special reason or “excuse” required. Delaware’s House passed a bill to approve same day registration.
Arizona enacted a trio of bills that increase ballot and registration access. Louisiana enacted legislation expanding voter access during states of emergency and lawmakers sent bills to the governor that would increase election worker compensation as well as effectively ban secure ballot drop boxes.
Looking ahead: We’ll be watching to see if Gov. Kathy Hochul signs the New York Voting Rights Act, as well as legislation to meet the 10-day constitutional minimum for the state's voter registration deadline.
Here are the details:
Rhode Island creates no-excuse mail voting. On Tuesday, Gov. Daniel McKee signed the Let RI Vote Act ( S.B. 2007), which eliminates the requirement that voters have a special reason – or “excuse” – to vote by mail. Rhode Island is now one of 34 states that allow qualified voters to cast a ballot by mail with no excuse required. This new law also facilitates mail voting by allowing voters to request mail ballots online, requiring at least one drop box per municipality, and eliminating the requirement that voters get their mail ballots and mail ballot applications notarized or witnessed.
Arizona enacts legislation ensuring voters who apply for mail ballots, but do not return them, can still vote in person. Last week, Gov. Doug Ducey signed S.B. 1460, which allows voters who apply for mail ballots, but do not return them, to cast a regular ballot on Election Day (as long as the electronic poll book confirms that they have not returned their ballot). He also signed S.B. 1362, which allows voters with completed mail ballots to bring them to a polling place on Election Day, show ID, and insert the mail ballot directly into a tabulator without requiring the signature verification that all other mail ballots must undergo. Finally, Ducey signed S.B. 1170, which requires the Department of Game and Fish to provide voter registration services to people applying for a hunting, fishing or trapping license.
Louisiana expands voter access during states of emergency, and state lawmakers send bills to the governor that would ban drop boxes and increase election worker compensation. Last week, Gov. John Bel Edwards signed S.B. 258, which increases voter access during states of emergency by permitting the secretary of state to conduct early voting at times and locations accessible to affected voters. Also last week, the Legislature sent two other bills to the governor, including a bill that would effectively ban secure ballot drop boxes and one that would increase election worker compensation.
New Hampshire’s strict voter ID bill is signed by the speaker of the House and heads to the secretary of state. S.B. 418, which would make the state's voter ID law more restrictive, continues to advance through the legislative process. Now that the bill has been signed by the speaker of the House, it advances to the secretary of state’s office for signature and then to the governor. Current New Hampshire law allows voters without physical ID to cast a regular ballot if they complete an affidavit affirming their identity, under penalty of perjury. This bill would eliminate that alternative, and instead rescind their vote from the count if they are unable to show an ID within 10 days of the election. Most states with voter ID laws offer an alternative to ensure the identity of voters without ID can be verified through other means. This new bill would put New Hampshire in the minority.
The Delaware House passes same-day voter registration. The Delaware House of Representatives passed a bill that will allow voter registration to continue until the close of polls on Election Day. Under current law, the registration deadline is the fourth Saturday before Election Day. The bill now heads to the state Senate.
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.