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The Voting Rights Lab is tracking 2,176 bills so far this session, with 579 bills that tighten the rules governing voter access or election administration and 1,035 bills that expand the rules.
In the final days of the legislative session, Arizona lawmakers passed a bill that would revive previously vetoed approaches to voter purges and another to ensure voters can track the status of their mail ballots online. Louisiana enacted legislation prohibiting stand-alone drop boxes as well as bills to provide voter registration opportunities in high schools and codifying an absentee ballot cure process.
Meanwhile, New Hampshire’s legislature sent the governor a bill that imposes harsh criminal penalties for election administrators. Delaware appears to be on the verge of enacting same-day registration. And the Safeguard Fair Elections Act, legislation that would provide a number of protections against election threats and intimidation, was introduced into the North Carolina Senate.
Looking ahead: Missouri Gov. Mike Parson is likely to sign a bill creating in-person early voting and strengthening voter ID requirements on Wednesday.
Here are the details:
Arizona lawmakers pass flurry of bills as session ends. The Arizona Legislature spent several long days finishing up its work for the 2022 session last week. In addition to passing the state’s budget, the Legislature passed several election-related measures to cue them up for either the governor’s signature or their presentation to Arizona voters in the fall. Lawmakers added an amendment related to voter registration purgesto H.B. 2243 before it passed, very similar to that which Gov. Doug Ducey vetoed earlier this session. They also passed a bill ensuring voters can track the status of their mail ballots online. If the governor signs it, voters will be able to see when their ballots are received, verified and counted.
Missouri’s governor plans to sign legislation that would create in-person early voting, while also tightening the state’s voter ID law. This week, Parson plans to sign H.B. 1878, legislation that would create early voting for the first time in Missouri – but would also make the voter ID law in the state more strict. The bill would create two weeks of early voting via in-person absentee voting. It would also make the state’s ID law more restrictive by eliminating many of the ID types that Missouri voters are currently allowed to show. In Missouri, the governor has 45 days after a bill is passed and the General Assembly adjourns to sign or veto that bill.
Louisiana facilitates student voter registration and codifies a cure process, while restricting absentee ballot return. Gov. John Bel Edwards signed a bill that requires all public and charter high schools in the state to provide eligible 17-year-old seniors with an opportunity to register to vote on school computers or paper applications. Louisiana also codified an absentee ballot cure process. While the state already had regulations establishing a notice and cure process, the newly enacted legislation would bar future secretaries of state from eliminating the system.
Louisiana also enacted legislation that would limit the in-person return of absentee ballots to registrars’ offices and early voting sites, prohibiting stand-alone drop boxes. In 2020, the New Orleans City Council won a legal fight allowing local officials to establish alternative, staffed, ballot drop-off sites, which are prohibited under the new legislation.
The Delaware Senate passes legislation that will establish same-day registration on Election Day. H.B. 25, a carryover bill from last session, would establish Election Day registration by moving the registration deadline from the Saturday before Election Day to the close of polls on Election Day. The bill has been sent to Gov. Jay Carney’s desk.
New Hampshire sends legislation to the governor targeting election administrators. The New Hampshire legislature passed H.B. 1567, which would direct the attorney general to investigate allegations against local election officials, make election official misconduct the only misdemeanor for which a conviction results in disenfranchisement, and establish civil penalties of up to $1,000 for unintentional misconduct by election officials. If passed, this legislation could interfere with the retention of election officials and make it more difficult to administer elections. The bill is now eligible for the governor’s signature.
The Safeguard Fair Elections Act is introduced in North Carolina. A new bill introduced in North Carolina last week ( S.B. 916) would establish criminal penalties for intimidation, threats or coercion of voters and election officials. The bill would also safeguard election totals by establishing penalties for public officials who refused to certify election results, require political party observers to complete training designed by the State Board of Elections, and establish funding for the board to monitor and track threats to voters and election officials.
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.