POLL TESTING — Well over 100 million Americans will head to the polls this year — and some of them two or even three times, depending on how their state structures its primaries. And by-and-large, states made it easier in 2023 for voters to participate. A new report from the Institute for Responsive Government, a left-leaning nonprofit that advocates for “pro-voter policies,” is out with its election policy progress reports for all fifty states and Washington D.C. The findings, shared first with Nightly, point to many states across the map making what they deem to be improvements to their voting laws, even if it is incremental. “This is going to be a tough presidential election, there’s going to be a lot of anti-democracy mishegoss in the air that everyone is going to be thinking about 24/7,” Sam Oliker-Friedland, the group’s executive director and a former Department of Justice civil rights division attorney, said. But “I want us to go into the 2024 cycle knowing that 2023 was overall a very, very good year.” IRG has a fairly unique methodology for ranking states’ voter access laws. States are given a letter grade, but instead of it being a pure state-to-state comparison — like states with generally accepted expansive voter access, like a California or a Utah, automatically get an A and the most restrictive states get an F — states are grouped into three tiers that take baseline voter access into account, and then get a letter grade based on how they moved from there. So California — labeled a top-tier state for access — received just a C as “other western states have continued to pass more substantial pro-voter policies while California falls behind,” while bottom-tier Kentucky earned a B for bipartisan — if sometimes incremental — election reforms. “The goal is not … ‘red state bad, blue state good,’” said Neal Ubriani, the organization’s policy and research director and another former DOJ civil rights division attorney. “Let’s look at what a state actually did in the past year and see is the arrow pointing up? Is the arrow pointing down? And let’s realistically assess what’s reasonable for a state to accomplish.” Oklahoma, for example, got a C+ — a relatively favorable grade in this report — after launching an online voter registration system and bumping up criminal charges for people who threaten election workers. “Oklahoma is a legislature that I know is getting a lot of pressure to do a lot of bad things for voters,” said Oliker-Friedland, noting it has a Republican supermajority. “There are ways for those folks to do good, pro-voter work in ways that are politically authentic to them.” IRG scored states on a handful of voter-facing policies — like if there is an automatic voter registration and access to mail voting — along with back-end policy decisions that voters don’t directly interact with, like adequately funding election offices and membership in the Electronic Registration Information Center (ERIC), an interstate vote list maintenance program that was targeted by former President Donald Trump and his allies in 2023. Notably, the ranking doesn’t consider changes to campaign finance law and redistricting. Three states scored A+’s in 2023 — Michigan, New Mexico and Minnesota — after implementing things like secure automatic voter registration, re-enfranchisement for formerly incarcerated felons or expanding early voting — all policies generally favored by liberal-leaning reformers for expanding the franchise. All three states, too, remained members of ERIC. “This year was amazing in terms of the level of pro-voter policy that passed both in red states and blue states,” said Ubriani. “Obviously, there was some backsliding in certain states. But I feel much better about the level of access that voters have in 2024 compared to 2022 and 2020.” Welcome to POLITICO Nightly. Reach out with news, tips and ideas at nightly@politico.com. Or contact tonight’s author on X (formerly known as Twitter) at @ZachMontellaro.
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