Skip to content
Search

Latest Stories

Top Stories

States of denial: Tracking election deniers in key state legislatures

Voting lines
Jessica McGowan/Getty Images

Voters elect more than 7,000 state legislators across the United States. In a system like ours, where elections are run by individual states, that means legislators have immense power to determine voting procedures and shape how elections are administered. When they serve in state legislatures, election deniers can leverage this power to erode our democracy — and do so outside the spotlight of national politics.

We have created a resource identifying the election deniers serving as legislators in seven states — Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, New Mexico, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin — using data collected by States United Action and the McCourtney Institute for Democracy. These seven states were the focal points of the effort to overturn the 2020 presidential election. As a result, they also became centers of the election denier movement, and hotbeds of election lies and misinformation.


In total, we found that 201 sitting legislators in these seven states are election deniers.

Understanding the threat

In some legislatures, election deniers are a substantial political force: They make up a third of the Arizona Legislature and nearly half of the Pennsylvania Senate. In other states, election deniers represent a much smaller share of the legislature. But even in small numbers, election deniers can have outsized impact. Some serve in leadership positions. Others sit on committees that can introduce, shape, suppress, or kill election-related bills.

Sign up for The Fulcrum newsletter

Regardless of the positions they hold in their respective legislatures, election deniers in recent years have introduced or cosponsored numerous bills that would add barriers to voting, enable investigations of voters, promote election conspiracy theories, make it harder for nonpartisan election officials to do their jobs, or otherwise interfere with the routine functioning of elections.

In Arizona in 2023, an election denier sponsored a bill that would have allowed for full hand counts of ballots, which subject election results to human error and fatigue. Another offered a bill that would make ballot images and voters’ personal information public. In Pennsylvania, election deniers sponsored and cosponsored a bill requiring the state to create a hotline for election fraud, which is practically nonexistent. In Wisconsin, seven election deniers cosponsored a constitutional amendment to restrict funding for election offices by banning donations. These are just a few examples of many.

And even when bills like these fail, they erode public confidence in elections and allow election disinformation to spread.

Some election deniers have taken their efforts even further. After the 2020 election, state legislators were among those who supported President Donald Trump’s attempt to overrule the decision of the voters and remain in power. And three election deniers who are now state legislators joined the effort outright by serving as fake electors — signing their names to official-looking documents falsely claiming that Trump was the rightful winner in their states.

This combined record shows that election deniers in state legislatures are a threat to current and future elections, either by their actions as legislators, by promoting disinformation and conspiracy theories, or by their demonstrated failure to respect legitimate election results.

Read More

Complaint Filed to Ethics Officials Regarding Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick
red and white x sign

Complaint Filed to Ethics Officials Regarding Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick

On Friday, March 21, the Campaign Legal Center (CLC) filed a complaint with the Office of Government Ethics (OGE) related to U.S. Secretary of Commerce Howard Lutnick urging the purchase of Tesla stock on March 19th.

CLC is a nonpartisan legal organization dedicated to solving the challenges facing American democracy. Its mission is to fight for every American’s freedom to vote and participate meaningfully in the democratic process, particularly Americans who have faced political barriers because of race, ethnicity, or economic status.

Keep ReadingShow less
Understanding the Debate on Presidential Immunity

The U.S. White House.

Getty Images, Caroline Purser

Understanding the Debate on Presidential Immunity

Presidential Immunity: History and Background

Presidential immunity is the long-standing idea that the president of the United States has exemption from liability or legal proceedings for acts related to the duties of presidential office. Contrary to popular belief, presidential immunity is not explicitly enumerated in the Constitution; only sitting members of Congress are explicitly granted judicial immunity through the Constitution’s Speech or Debate Clause. Rather, the concept of presidential immunity has arisen through the Department of Justice’s longstanding policy against prosecuting presidents in office and the Supreme Court’s interpretation of Article II, which has developed through a number of Supreme Court cases dating back to 1867.

Keep ReadingShow less
Donald Trump
President Donald Trump.
Brandon Bell/Getty Images

Trump 2.0: Navigating the New Political Landscape

With Trump’s return to the White House, we once again bear daily witness to a spectacle that could be described as entertaining, were it only a TV series. But Trump’s unprecedented assault on our democratic norms and institutions is not only very real but represents the gravest peril our democratic republic has confronted in the last 80 years.

Trump’s gradual consolidation of power and authoritarian proclivities, reminiscent of an earlier era, are very frightening on their own account. But it is his uncanny ability to control the narrative that empowers him to shred our nation’s fabric while proceeding with impunity. His actions not only threaten the very republic that he now leads but overturn the entire post-WWII world order, which is now in chaos. Trump has ostensibly cast aside the governing principle with the U.N. Charter of Sovereignty. By suggesting on multiple occasions that the U.S. will “get Greenland one way or another,” and that Canada might become our 51st state, our neighbor to the north is now developing plans to protect itself from what it views as the enemy across the border.

Keep ReadingShow less
Free Speech and Freedom of the Press Under Assault

A speakerphone locked in a cage.

Getty Images, J Studios

Free Speech and Freedom of the Press Under Assault

On June 4, 2024, an op-ed I penned (“Project 2025 is a threat to democracy”) was published in The Fulcrum. It received over 74,000 views and landed as one of the top 10 most-read op-eds—out of 1,460—published in 2024.

The op-ed identified how the right-wing extremist Heritage Foundation think tank had prepared a 900-page blueprint of actions that the authors felt Donald Trump should implement—if elected—in the first 180 days of being America’s 47th president. Dozens of opinion articles were spun off from the op-ed by a multitude of cross-partisan freelance writers and published in The Fulcrum, identifying—very specifically—what Trump and his appointees would do by following the Heritage Foundation’s dictum of changing America from a pluralistic democracy to a form of democracy that, according to its policy blueprint, proposes “deleting the terms diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI), plus gender equality, out of every federal rule, agency regulation, contract, grant, regulation and piece of legislation that exists.”

Keep ReadingShow less