In the aftermath of an election that included dozens of changes to voting laws, states have seen a surge in legislation that could further alter the voting process — or unwind some of the advancements made in response to Covid-19.
The pandemic prompted more Americans than ever to vote by mail last year. Seeing broad success with this and other alternative voting methods, Democrats want to make absentee and early voting both permanent and more widespread. But Republicans want stricter voting rules to protect against fraud — even though no significant allegations were proven true last fall.
A report released Tuesday by the Brennan Center for Justice, a liberal public policy institute at New York University Law School, found that just a month into the new year more than 500 voting rights bills have already been introduced in 37 state legislatures — more than double what had been proposed by this time last year. While a majority of this legislation is aimed at expanding access to the ballot box, more than 100 measures across 28 states would restrict voting access.
Of course, increased volume does not necessarily translate into legislative success. A study of 2013-14 state legislation by CQ StateTrack, which monitors bills in every legislature, found that one-quarter of state-level bills became law. The political leanings of individual states is more predictive than the overall volume.
Source: Brennan Center for Justice
Legislation to restrict voting access
The Brennan Center's analysis found that legislators have introduced three times the number of restrictive voting bills this year. These 106 bills are mostly aimed at limiting mail voting and adding more stringent voting requirements. At this time last year, only 35 such bills had been proposed.
While a lot of these bills won't succeed, in GOP strongholds they could gain serious traction. Missouri, Mississippi and New Hampshire are among the red states considering these types of measures.
In battleground Pennsylvania, lawmakers have introduced 11 different bills that would restrict voting access, the most of any state so far. Three would eliminate the state's recently adopted no-excuse absentee voting policy and another would make it harder to obtain a mail ballot by removing the permanent early voting list.
Ten states have proposals to add new or more strict voter ID requirements for those who wish to vote in person early or on Election Day. And four states are considering doing away with in-person registration on Election Day.
Legislation to expand voting access
Meanwhile, state lawmakers are also considering many more proposals to make voting easier and more accessible. There are currently more than 400 bills pending in 35 states — more than double the amount introduced at this time last year, according to the Brennan Center's analysis.
These bills are mainly focused on expanding access to mail voting and in-person early voting, bolstering voter registration and fortifying voting rights policies. Democratic-controlled states will try to piggyback on the success of these reforms in the 2020 election and establish more permanent policies moving forward.
Solidly blue New York leads the pack with 56 reform bills introduced so far. Texas is not far behind with 53 such bills, but passing voting reform in the Lone Star State will be much more of an uphill battle.
Lawmakers in 11 states want to adopt permanent no-excuse absentee voting policies. Bills in eight states would require local officials to provide drop boxes for absentee ballots. And 13 states may consider allowing election officials to process mail ballots earlier than in past years.
Legislation to establish early in-person voting, extend the early voting period or add early voting sites has been introduced in 14 states. Six states have bills to adopt same-day voter registration, five have bills for automatic voter registration and seven have legislation to adopt both.
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.