Democracy Crisis in the Making: How State Legislatures are Politicizing, Criminalizing, and Interfering with Elections [August 2022]

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Note regarding methodology: Each year, state legislators introduce thousands of bills related to elections. One organization, Voting Rights Lab, currently tracks almost 2,500 election-related bills under consideration by legislatures this year, and that number is likely to rise. To create this Report, we relied on the Voting Rights Lab database and supplemented it with other legislative proposals that we discovered via independent research. We included legislation introduced between December 15, 2021, when our last update stopped, and July 31, 2022. We also included legislation from our 2021 Reports that was still active this year. The States United Democracy Center, Protect Democracy, and Law Forward worked together to analyze each proposal to determine whether it would—if adopted—materially increase the risk of election subversion, and to filter out those that we concluded did not meet that criterion. A complete list of the bills that fall within the scope of this Report is included as an Appendix.