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 2,147 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.
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.