1. Montana Election Observation Initiative Final Report 2024

    In a final report on elections in Carbon, Cascade, Lake, Lewis and Clark and Missoula counties, Montana Election Observation Initiative said local officials followed state law, maintained strong chain-of-custody procedures and gave observers access from pre-election testing through the post-election canvass. Both hand counts in smaller counties and machine tabulation in larger ones were conducted […]

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  2. Democracy Delayed: The Operational and Partisan Impacts of California’s Election Administration System

    The Rose Institute of State and Local Government at Claremont McKenna College has released a report analyzing how California’s transition to vote-by-mail elections has contributed to the state’s slow vote counts. The report, titled Democracy Delayed: The Operational and Partisan Impacts of California’s Election Administration System, shows how this transition has affected both ballot-processing times […]

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  3. Bridging Divides: Recultivating Election Security and Trust

    Former election officials Kathy Boockvar (D-PA) and Matt Crane (R-CO) discuss the challenges that have emerged over the past five years in the elections space — polarization accelerating into hostility; false narratives and propaganda sharpening every divide; and escalating attacks on the very bedrock of our electoral system.

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  4. Democracy Denied for Disabled Americans: Guardianship and the Right To Vote

    Disabled Americans have long faced barriers to voting, and recently enacted anti-voting state laws have increased these barriers. A total of 79 restrictive voting laws were passed between 2021 and 2024, including constraints on who is allowed to assist with completing and returning a disabled person’s ballot in both Texas and Georgia in 2021. President […]

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  5. Ballots vs. Backlash: Trends, Threats, and the Future of Direct Democracy

    As state legislatures across the country become more polarized, citizens are increasingly turning to direct democracy to protect fundamental rights and advance popular policies that elected officials refuse to address. But the success of recent initiatives, especially around issues like reproductive rights, has prompted a strong backlash from some state legislatures opposed to those efforts. […]

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  6. Bolstering Funding and Practices for Resilient Elections

    Free and fair elections are the bedrock of representative democracy. The U.S. elections system, as disperse and complicated as it may be, has reflected the will of its citizens and promoted peaceable transfers thousands of times via federal, state, and local elections. Today, this essential foundation is under stress. Election administrators continually lack the support […]

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  7. America’s County Governments: A Primer on County-Level Election Administration

    The United States has a decentralized system of election administration, where states and local governments share the responsibility of overseeing election administration.1 The organization of local election systems can vary such that states allow several local offices or authorities to supervise election administration.2 In certain states, election administration responsibilities are divided between a local election […]

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  8. Understanding Democratic Decline in the United States

    Experts agree that the health of U.S. democracy has declined in recent years—but what does that mean? The United States is experiencing two major forms of democratic erosion in its governing institutions: election manipulation and executive overreach. Most obviously, after the 2020 election, the sitting president, despite admitting privately that he had lost, attempted to […]

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  9. Breaking Barriers to the Ballot Box: Expanding Language Access for California Voters

    Our democracy is under real and urgent threat, from rampant disinformation and a surge in voter suppression legislation to politicians deliberately showing distrust in election outcomes in order to maintain their own power. And while the state of California and counties in California have adopted various pro-democracy voting practices and procedures, reforms such as vote-by-mail […]

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