“Election officials do want elections to become boring again,” said Rachel Orey, the associate director of the BPC’s Elections Project and an author of the report. “We need to think more realistically about what it is that we actually need to do to improve elections.”
They might have their work cut out for them.
The explosion of election denialism, Orey says, has distracted “from the actual challenges that are undermining elections. If legislators’ attention is so focused on appeasing critics, they end up doing things that aren’t actually solving problems.”
One longtime recommendation they reup is to urge states to join or remain in the Electronic Registration Information Center — an interstate organization that helps states maintain their voter rolls — in an effort to make roll maintenance “a regular and uncontroversial part of the elections process.”
But what’s happening on the ground is the opposite. Several Republican-led states have left the organization over the last year after it was attacked by former President Donald Trump and his allies. Some affiliated with the organization fear more departures are coming.
BPC recommends improving funding for elections, a bugaboo for some in the field. The report’s first set of recommendations call for the state and federal government to supply more reliable funding for election officials.
The report argues that it is needed because “an increasingly interconnected, complicated, and contentious political environment means that vulnerabilities in one jurisdiction could cast doubt on the election and, ultimately, on American democracy as a whole.”
The report says states should “consider requiring that all ballots be in hand [of election officials] by the close of polls to be counted,” in an effort to expedite the amount of time it takes results to be tabulated. Election officials have become increasingly concerned about the window between when polls close and when a winner is clear, a time they say is ripe for bad actors to spread disinformation.
The idea would likely be unpopular with some Democrats who advocate letting ballots that are postmarked by Election Day and are received by officials days later to count.
That recommendation is part of one of the report’s other major goals, which is looking to have election results that are “trusted by candidates and the general public.”
That and other recommendations look to speed up ballot counting timelines, an effort to counteract “today’s rapid-information culture [that] perceives longer waits as inherently suspect.”
There is also a recognition that post-election work is just as important as what happens on Election Day.
BPC believes holding “cross-partisan” election audits could curb the misinformation that stemmed from states like Arizona, where the Republican-led state Senate ran a post-election review of Maricopa County that was widely panned by election experts as amateurish and fueling conspiracy theories.
“Getting some sort of agreed-upon, trusted approach to audit the process can really then enhance [elections],” said Scott Jarrett, who is co-elections director in Maricopa and a BPC elections task force member. “Not only for the near-term, but then for decades and decades of elections to come.”
The election certification process has been revealed as a weak point in American democracy. In the immediate aftermath of the 2020 election, allies of Trump targeted election certification in Michigan and elsewhere. And a handful of counties across the country had to be ordered by courts to certify some results during the midterms. “Certification challenges might increase in the days after the 2024 presidential election,” the report warns.
Among other things, the report urges lawmakers to allow state election officials to step in if a local jurisdiction does not certify, and allowing for “courts [to] expediently intervene” if officials refuse to certify.
The ultimate goal of the entire report, officials say, is to have elections run smoothly. The thinking there is that if voters have a positive individual experience, they will be more trusting of the system overall.
But they acknowledge that the heat on election officials likely isn’t going away anytime soon.
“I would love for it to be boring again, and people aren’t paying attention, and they just show up, vote and are confident that their vote has been counted,” said Monica Holman Evans, another BPC task force member and the executive director of the D.C. board of elections. “But I don’t know if that’s likely to happen.”
