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 2,185 bills so far this session, with 579 bills that tighten voter access or election administration and 1,041 bills that expand the rules. The rest are neutral or mixed or unclear in their impact.
Georgia is processing thousands of challenges to voter registrations following the enactment of a new law authorizing such challenges. And Texas’ Harris County was selected as the only one of 254 counties to be audited in consecutive election cycles.
New Jersey Gov. Phil Murphy signed a package of election bills, including legislation that helps facilitate mail voting. A Nevada court declared a proposed voter ID ballot initiative unconstitutional. And North Carolina begins voter registration for residents regaining their right to vote after a felony conviction.
Here are the details:
New Jersey enacts legislation to facilitate mail voting. New Jersey Gov. Phil Murphy signed a package of election bills, including legislation that facilitates mail voting. A.B. 3822 allows election officials to begin tabulating mail ballots prior to Election Day. A.B. 3817 allows voters to request mail ballots through an online portal. It also allows voters to sign up for the permanent vote-by-mail list, as well as make changes to their voter registration, online. Meanwhile, A.B. 3832 aims to boost poll worker recruitment by exempting poll worker compensation from state income tax and unemployment eligibility. The bill also requires an additional review of death records two months before an election.
Nevada court declares voter ID ballot initiative unconstitutional. Last Friday, a Nevada state court ruled that a ballot initiative designed to create stricter voter ID requirements violates the state’s constitution. The initiative would have created a strict photo ID requirement for in-person voting and would have restricted the types of IDs voters could use to verify their identity when curing mail ballots. The court ruled that by imposing new costs on the state without providing a mechanism for funding, the initiative would create an unfunded mandate, which is forbidden by the Nevada constitution.
Voter registration begins for North Carolinians on probation and parole. On Wednesday, North Carolina residents who are on probation or parole due to felony convictions regained their right to vote thanks to a March court ruling. This change is expected to impact 56,000 individuals who previously would not have been able to vote until they completed every term of their sentence, including probation or parole. North Carolina is among the 24 states where citizens with past felony convictions can vote while on community supervision.
Georgia processes mass challenges to voter registrations, following passage of new law authorizing such challenges. In Georgia’s six most populous counties, the registrations of over 25,000 voters have been challenged by other registered voters in 2022 alone. These challenges were authorized by last year’s S.B. 202.
Texas selects Harris County for consecutive audits. The Texas Secretary of State’s office announced that the four counties selected for randomized audits following the November 2022 election are Harris, Cameron, Guadalupe and Eastland counties. The randomized audits will be conducted due to the enactment of S.B. 1 in 2021. As one of the four counties audited following the 2020 election, Harris will be the only one of Texas’s 254 counties to be audited in consecutive election cycles.
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.