Hand placing a piece of pager into a clear ballot box in front of the United States flag

Reports: States adopting policies to increase voter access, secure elections

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(Northern Rockies News Service) Election laws have been in the spotlight since 2020 - but despite the controversy, a new report finds many states have made election administration easier.

The Bipartisan Policy Center analyzed state legislation between 2022 and 2024 based on twelve policies that fall into three broad categories - voter registration, ballot casting, and vote counting.

One of the report's authors, Will Adler - associate director of the Elections Project at the center - said Idaho has achieved nine of the twelve policies his organization identified as "balancing voter accessibility and election security."

Pile of red, white, and blue lapel pins with the word "Vote"

"Idaho does not have a couple policies that we think all states should have," said Adler. "It does not have automatic voter registration, it is not in the Electronic Registration Information Center partnership, and there's no process in state law to allow voters to correct any problems with their absentee ballots."

ERIC is a nonprofit organization that shares voter registration information between member states to ensure voter rolls are up to date.

But on the positive side, Idaho has adopted policies like online voter registration, no-excuse absentee voting, and pre-processing of votes - so that officials can begin the count before election day.

Adler said his organization found an increase in the number of states adopting the policies it identified between 2022 and 2024, up to 68 percent across the country.

"We've actually seen pretty heartening results," said Adler. "So in most of the twelve policies that we identified, we've seen states increase their adoption."

Adler said the federal government should incentivize adopting these policies.

"For a long time, elections have been woefully underfunded at the federal level," said Adler. "That puts a lot of strain on election officials to do more with less. It puts a lot of impetus on state lawmakers to create ways to fund their state and local elections."

Support for this reporting was provided by the Carnegie Corporation of New York.