Brian Hinkle is the Senior Voting Policy Researcher at the Movement Advancement Project (MAP) and oversees the Democracy Maps program.
Former President Trump is campaigning for re-election. Disinformation continues to run rampant on social media. Large portions of the country still doubt valid election results. Sound familiar? Signs point to 2024 being a redux of 2020.
In addition, the recent indictments charging former President Trump and others with a conspiracy to overturn the legitimate results of the 2020 election, among other crimes, highlights both the continuing threat of the election denial movement as well as a potential path for states to hold these bad actors accountable.
The good news is that states can act before the 2024 elections to fill gaps in laws that allow election denialism to undermine democracy. Now is the time for states to pass laws to prevent 2024 from being a repeat of 2020’s election denialism crisis.
The need for action by lawmakers is urgent: More than two in three American voters -- 157 million people -- live in states with at least a moderate risk of election denialism jeopardizing future elections, as shown in the Movement Advancement Project’s National Election Denial Risk Index. What’s more, 29 million voters live in a state with a high risk of election denialism.
The key threats that result from election denialism are far-reaching and are pushing our democracy to the brink of chaos or even collapse. Those threats include election deniers infiltrating election offices, interference in standard post-election processes, harassment and violence targeting nonpartisan election officials, restricting voting rights, and more.
Analysis from the National Election Denial Risk Index currently shows that five battleground states are still at moderate risk of being impacted by election denialism: Arizona, Florida, Georgia, North Carolina, and Wisconsin. In the last presidential election these states had slim margins of victory, making policies to defend against election denialism all the more important to ensure our elections are free from interference.
The good news is that three battleground states now fall in a lower risk category of being impacted by election denialism: Michigan, Nevada, and Pennsylvania.
At the beginning of the year Michigan was the only lower-risk battleground state. Nevada joined this lower-risk category when it enacted a law to protect against insider threats to elections by making it a crime to facilitate unauthorized access to voting equipment. Pennsylvania’s improvement is the result of new protections against election-related disinformation which make it a crime to spread false information related to the time, place or manner of elections.
At its core, election denialism is a rejection of democracy. Similarly, the nature of a republic requires that free and fair elections are a cornerstone of U.S. democracy–not a rigged system where politicians can overturn the will of the voters and the legitimate results of an election. Not only does election denialism further erode public trust in elections and institutions, but it feeds into a broader set of threats to our democracy.
So what are these rising threats and what can be done to counter them?
Threat 1: An ongoing core threat is election deniers who undermine the public’s trust with false narratives of fraud and then offer so-called “solutions” that infringe on democracy and restrict voting rights. Legislation like statewide voting rights acts provide critical protections so that all eligible voters can participate in democracy by prohibiting racial discrimination in election administration and ensuring consistent elections procedures across all local jurisdictions.
Currently, only seven states have a statewide voting rights act. Even more, federal voting legislation like the Freedom to Vote Act would result in a dramatic shift in ensuring a stronger democracy nationwide.
Threat 2: To counter election deniers infiltrating the system, states can implement stronger policies for nonpartisan election administration as well as measures to counter insider threats. Forty-one states routinely conduct truly independent, nonpartisan audits after an election, which allows states to ensure accurate vote counts. However, only 13 states go even further to ensure the accuracy and integrity of election results with risk-limiting audits, which use statistical methods to ensure even stronger verification of vote results.
Threat 3: The ultimate goal of the rising harassment and violence against election officials is interfering with election results. Ways to bolster against this threat are enacting laws to protect election officials, increasing funding for elections to ensure security measures, and other proper infrastructure. Currently 11 states have laws to specifically protect election officials.
Threat 4: In the last two election cycles we saw numerous attempts to subvert legitimate election results by interfering in post-election processes. States can protect against this by limiting partisan involvement in post-election procedures, increasing penalties for election subversion, and limiting frivolous recount requests. When election administration is properly conducted by nonpartisan professionals, election results are protected against insider threats.
Threat 5: Among the insidious threats jeopardizing our democracy is rampant disinformation that plants doubt in the minds of American voters. To answer this growing threat, policymakers can implement transparency measures to help increase voter confidence.
For example, most states have secure voting technology available for the majority of votes where voting machines use voter-verifiable paper ballots to allow the voter to verify their choices. These systems prevent hacking and security breaches. However, 13 states still do not have these secure voting systems available for the majority of their voters. Two of those states – Georgia and Nevada – are battleground states and could improve public confidence in election results by upgrading their systems in advance.
To be sure, election denialism is a widespread phenomenon requiring varied approaches. And state policymakers have the power to take meaningful steps to address the problem. Policy solutions can prevent new surges of election denialism in 2024 – and these must take precedence in next year’s legislative sessions.
While the claims of election deniers didn’t ultimately upend our elections in the 2022 midterms, election deniers still pose serious threats to our democracy which need to be addressed in advance of the presidential election. By enacting legislation to protect voting rights, insulating election administration systems from partisan actors, protecting election officials acting in good faith from threats, and taking measures to increase voter confidence, our democracy can be protected, preserved, and even further strengthened.
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.