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The Voting Rights Lab is tracking 2,147 bills so far this session, with 576 bills that tighten the rules governing voter access or election administration and 1,023 bills that expand the rules.
Oklahoma enacted new laws that limit options in election-related litigation, make it more difficult to vote by mail, and create a new voter-facing felony. But Oklahoma and Illinois both enacted legislation improving access for voters with disabilities.
Missouri Gov. Mike Parson plans to sign a bill making the voter ID law in the state stricter and another bill to create in-person early voting in the state. Arizona enacted legislation that would expand voter registration services and improve the ability of mail voters to track their ballot.
Looking ahead: North Carolina’s General Assembly is now in short session through the end of June.
Here are the details:
Arizona enacts legislation increasing access to voter registration services and improving a voter’s ability to track the status of their mail ballot. Monday morning, Gov. Doug Ducey signed S.B. 1170, which adds voter registration services at the Department of Fish & Game for people applying for hunting, fishing and trapping licenses. Last week, he signed S.B. 1329, ensuring that mail ballots received on Election Day are promptly loaded into the ballot tracking system. Legislation that would prohibit same-day registration – and create a felony to punish any election official who registers someone on Election Day – is currently on the governor’s desk. Existing Arizona law does not allow same-day registration.
Oklahoma enacts several bills with a mix of provisions expanding and restricting voter access and election administration. On Friday, Gov. Kevin Stitt signed several election-related bills into law. One of the bills would make it more difficult to vote by mail by requiring that mail voters provide a specific ID number when applying for a mail ballot. Another would create new limits on election-related litigation by forcing all lawsuits to be resolved by court order and allowing legislative leadership to intervene. Another bill would allow visually disabled voters to receive an accessible ballot electronically, but it would also threaten voters with a felony if they are not legally blind but apply for a ballot electronically. Oklahoma’s regular legislative session ends this week.
The governor of Illinois signs legislation improving mail ballot access for voters with print disabilities. Gov. J.B. Pritzker signed a new law making it easier to vote by mail for voters with physical or cognitive disabilities that prevent them from effectively reading or using printed material.
Missouri’s legislative session ends with the governor planning to sign a bill that would create in-person early voting, while also tightening the state’s voter ID law. Gov. Mike Parson announced that he would “certainly” 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 stricter. The bill would create two weeks of in-person early voting via in-person absentee ballots. 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 legislature adjourns to sign or veto that bill.
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.