A Democracy Crisis in the Making (Year-End Update)
Key Finding
Systematic tracking and categorization of 600+ state bills (62 enacted) that increase the risk of election subversion — a sourcebook practitioners can use to ground programming in concrete legislative trends.
About this research
This December 2023 white paper from Protect Democracy, States United Democracy Center, and Law Forward tracks state legislation introduced in 2023 that could increase the risk of election subversion, using the Voting Rights Lab bill tracker supplemented by the organizations’ own legal review. It documents 196 subversion-risk bills introduced across 39 states in 2023 (21 enacted) and more than 600 such bills since 2020 (62 enacted), sorting them into categories from seizing control over vote-counting to imposing new penalties on election administrators, giving practitioners a concrete, sourced picture of legislative trends.