For the small businesses supporting school transportation, the Corporate Transparency Act may be more than a speed bump in 2025.
In hopes of preventing criminals from hiding illegal acts through corporate anonymity, Congress passed the Corporate Transparency Act in 2021, sandwiched into a larger 1,482-page defense bill. The law initially took effect on Jan. 1, 2024, requiring companies to disclose stakeholder information to the Department of Treasury’s Financial Crimes Enforcement Network, or FinCEN, by Jan. 1, 2025.
In an order that called the law outright Orwellian, however, a federal judge on Dec. 3 granted an injunction blocking the Corporate Transparency Act from being enforced — a decision that U.S. attorneys quickly appealed, putting the fate of the act in legal limbo.
If the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals upholds the lower court’s decision, the Corporate Transparency Act will become a thing of the past. But if the appeals court overturns the injunction, businesses may have to file the required benefit ownership report very quickly.
While the federal judge in Texas granted an injunction blocking the Corporate Transparency Act from being enforced, a federal judge in Oregon denied a similar request in September, which will be reviewed by the Eleventh Circuit Court of Appeals.
Parties often ask the U.S. Supreme court to review split decisions among appeals court, but since the high court holds arguments for less than 1 percent of the cases submitted, it is impossible to know whether it will step in.
In the meantime, small businesses should keep the law on their radar. If it is revived, failure to report required information could result in $591 fines per day of violation as well as up to two years in jail and up to $10,000 in penalties.
“In a limbo like this the best practice is to be ready to file,” said Megan Henderson, an attorney at the Longmont, Colorado firm Lyons and Gaddis.
Specializing in real estate and business transactions, Henderson said she spent much of the past year advising clients on becoming compliant under the Corporate Transparency Act.
Most businesses that filed paperwork with their state to become incorporated would be required to disclose their beneficial owners with the federal government, but exemptions abound. One big carve out is for larger companies generating more than $5 million in gross receipts annually. The umbrella of “beneficial owners” might be broader than some people think and covering not just owners but indispensable managers as well.
FinCEN published a brief guide to help businesses navigate the requirements. While neither a lawyer nor an accountant is required to file the paperwork, the process can seem daunting, especially for mom and pop establishments with limited time and resources.
“It’s going to impact the contractors that service the school districts,” said Chris Wojciechowski, an accountant at the Bonadio Group in Rochester, New York.
Wojciechowski said the regulation is more burdensome to small businesses with fewer resources.
“There’s such a tight timeline regarding compliance,” he continued. “So how is our businesses going to deal with this? They’re going to have to be nimble and be on top of the transition if they turn the law back on.”
Even if the Corporate Transparency Act is ultimately defeated in the courts, businesses should still be on the lookout for similar legislation at the state level. One of the first copycat laws comes from New York lawmakers, requiring companies to report ownership by Jan. 1, 2026.
“It’s tricky because every state has their own regulations. I’ve seen companies who operate in one state come to another state and get slapped pretty hard with fines because they did not dig deep into the state regulations for school buses in that state,” said Mark Szyperski, president of On Your Mark Transportation, a consultancy firm based in Nashville, Tennessee.
For Szyperski, who grew up on the seat of his father’s Greyhound bus between Bay City and Detroit, Michigan, transportation is a family business.
Upon entering a new state, Szyperski said he often arranges to speak with the state’s school bus administrator to go over the basics. To be ready for the court’s outcome on the Corporate Transparency Act, he set up a Google alert and included news of the injunction in his newsletter.
“People need to be aware that [the injunction] could be overturned and then you best be getting ready to put the information into the system,” he said.
State Rep. Ryan Clancy (D-Milwaukee) takes a selfie at the 2024 conference of the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) in Washington, D.C. (Photo courtesy of Ryan Clancy)
Milwaukee State Rep. Ryan Clancy readily admits he was the odd one out last week at a Washington, D.C., meeting of the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC).
ALEC, a nonprofit that brings together state lawmakers and corporations and drafts model legislation, describes its point of view as “dedicated to the principles of limited government, free markets and federalism.” It has produced state policies embraced almost solely by Republicans — drafted with input from corporate members of the organization.
Clancy is neither a Republican politician nor a corporate official. “To the best of my knowledge, I would be the only Democrat — and almost certainly the only socialist” at the States & Nation Policy Summit ALEC held Tuesday through Thursday, Clancy said in an interview. But as a state legislator, he was technically welcome at the event.
On the last day, however, Clancy was summarily kicked out and told his registration would be withdrawn and the fee refunded. While declining to explain how, an ALEC spokesman said Clancy was being “disruptive” — something Clancy categorically denies.
Attending an ALEC event was important to him, said Clancy, who is just wrapping up his first term in the Assembly after being elected in 2022. He wanted to see the process by which ALEC drafts model legislation and distributes bill proposals through its member lawmakers to statehouses around the country.
Clancy said that in his first term in Madison he has seen a lot of legislation circulate that originated in ALEC proposals. Those included more than a dozen bills putting restrictions on trans and nonbinary people, such as preventing gender affirming medical care for people under 18, he said.
“My oldest child is trans,” Clancy said in an interview. “It was just horrific to have to bring together the community to push back on those. But it was also good to know about them in advance.”
Clancy said the anti-trans legislation points to priorities that he believes ALEC has beyond the talking points it makes about individual liberty, free markets and limited government.
“Even more economic-seeming policy discussions were often peppered with anti-trans and anti-DEI comments behind the scenes,” Clancy said.
While his attendance was cut short, he said, his time at the session offered a preview of ALEC-inspired legislation that he expects to see in the coming session of the state Legislature, and an opportunity for his fellow Democratic lawmakers to “figure out how we can push back on that.”
Democratic tradition
When Clancy joined ALEC and signed up to attend last week’s policy summit, he was following a tradition among Wisconsin Democrats in the state Legislature, who have long viewed the organization with suspicion.
The first Democrat to decide to attend ALEC sessions wasthen-state Rep. Mark Pocan, who began attending the meetings two decades ago, before he became a member of Congress. He was succeeded by Democratic Rep. Chris Taylor, who has since left the Legislature when Gov. Tony Evers appointed her to Dane County circuit court, before her election to the Wisconsin Court of Appeals.
Most recently in 2023, Reps. Kristina Shelton (D-Green Bay) and Francesca Hong (D-Madison)attended an ALEC annual meeting in Florida.
ALEC has its lawmaker members join two task forces, and Clancy, a former Milwaukee Public Schools teacher, chose education and the environment.
In the education task force, Clancy caught a discussion about legislation that would give families who home-school their children or enroll them in private schools a tax credit to offset the taxes they pay to support public schools.
“They were looking at it as fairness because [those families] shouldn’t have to pay for public schools and also pay for homeschooling or a private school as well,” he said.
As proposed, the tax credit would be non-refundable — meaning that a taxpayer would only collect up to the amount of their tax liability.
“What that means is if you are fairly well off, like middle class or rich, and you have a big tax liability at the end of the year, you’d get that back,” Clancy said. A lower-income family with a lower tax liability wouldn’t get as much, even if their school expenses were just as high.
He said another lawmaker suggested that in the name of fairness, the tax credit should be made refundable — paying the balance of the credit amount in cash to someone whose tax liability was less than the credit’s full value.
The lawmaker presenting the proposal rejected the suggestion, saying that “it was not supposed to be, quote, a wealth redistribution program,” Clancy said. The lawmaker called that “a bright line and she absolutely would never support that.”
Recycling — conservative or ‘woke’?
At the environmental task force session he attended, the principal topic was recycling — a subject that provoked conflicting opinions.
One participant advocating incentives for recycling disposable cans and bottles instead of sending them to landfills declared, “Conservation is conservative,” according to Clancy. “And then you have other people very angry about this saying no … recycling is ‘woke.’”
Still others countered in defense of recycling aluminum in particular, making the argument that “communist China is going to continue to get a leg up because we import aluminum from communist China all the time,” Clancy said.
Those arguments revolved around a model bill that would establish a deposit-based recycling system operated by the beverage industry rather than the state, with the deposit funds that consumers don’t collect staying with the industry, offsetting the costs for recycling initiatives and for marketing the system to consumers. “This would be a handout to corporations,” Clancy said.
Clancy said that throughout the meetings he kept his own reactions to the proposals to himself and listened to other lawmakers as they discussed the issues. He took notes and photographed information slides with his phone, something that he said he saw many other participants doing.
But he said he never spoke up during any of the presentations, raised questions or publicly engaged presenters or other participants.
“The extent of my behavior in both the task forces and the workshops was sitting there taking notes, holding up the [phone] camera and getting pictures of what was going on, just like all of the other participants who were not told to leave for that same behavior,” Clancy said.
Kicked out of the meeting
In the midst of the last session he attended on Thursday, however, a hotel security staff member came to him and escorted him from the room. Outside he was told that his registration had been withdrawn.
Clancy, who recorded the exchange with the security staff member, asked why he was being thrown out. The security staffer deferred the answer to ALEC officials, but Clancy said he’s never been told what violations he was accused of.
When registering, Clancy said he was directed to a code of conduct that ALEC has posted directed to media covering the event, but that he has seen no other such list of rules for participants. In any event, he said, he took pains to not draw attention to himself.
“I have recordings of all the things that I was in, and you can hear me not asking questions,” Clancy said. “That’s really difficult for me,” he added. “I mean, to be in those spaces, to hear them saying those things, and not to say what the hell is wrong with you people was an act of will on my part, and I succeeded. I managed not to say any of the things that a reasonable person would say in that situation, because I didn’t want to be, you know, accused of disrupting or anything else.”
Clancy questioned an unnamed ALEC representative whether he was being thrown out because he’d been identified as a Democrat or a socialist. He suggested that in doing so the organization would be running afoul of its 501(c)(3) tax-exemption and IRS rules under which “they can’t give undue influence to inside members of their group and exclude people based on partisan things.”
In response to the Wisconsin Examiner’s inquiry, ALEC’s communications director, Lars Dalseide, replied in an email message.
“All are welcome at ALEC events, where all attendees are asked to abide by our long-standing code of conduct. One that ensures a welcoming and productive experience for everyone in attendance. Sadly, the individual in question failed to adhere to these guidelines. On the final day of the conference, after several complaints, he was asked to leave,” Dalseide said.
In a subsequent email, Dalseide declined to clarify what actions of Clancy’s constituted conduct violations.
“We don’t release those kinds of details to the press,” he said. “If we did, then every speaker, member, and guest wouldn’t feel comfortable speaking freely at our events.”
While Dalseide said that attendees were reminded of the code of conduct at each session, Clancy denied that.
“They did not ever make reminders of any code of conduct at the beginning of any session, nor did I ever make a single comment or ask a question within any of them,” Clancy said. “I still don’t know what rules they’re accusing me of violating, or why speakers wouldn’t feel comfortable speaking if they knew the rules for attendees.”
Dalseide also relayed an additional statement from Leah Vukmir, a former Wisconsin state senator and former ALEC National Chair:
“The Wisconsin Socialist Party has been sending people to disrupt ALEC meetings for years, so it’s no surprise that the newest member of the Wisconsin Socialist Party would try to cause trouble at this year’s event. As a former National Chairman, I can attest to the fact that ALEC has always welcomed all views as long as individuals conduct themselves in a mature, professional manner.”
Clancy said he is a Democratic Party member and that, while he also identifies politically as a socialist, he is not a member of any Wisconsin Socialist Party, nor had he heard of any past actions by socialist-aligned groups to disrupt ALEC events.
Rep. Pocan was reached through his Congressional office and asked if during his years of attending ALEC he recalled any socialist groups attending or engaging in disruptive behavior.
Federal legislation seeking to require lap/shoulder seatbelts on school buses as well as stability control systems and automatic braking is before Congress for the fifth time since 2018.
Tennessee Rep. Steve Cohen, who co-introduced each previous House Democrat iteration as companion bills to efforts led by Sen. Tammy Duckworth of Illinois, reintroduced the School Bus Safety Act on Tuesday in the House. The legislation would implement recommendations issued by the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) that the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) require three-point seatbelts in all school buses.
Rep. Steve Cohen of Tennessee
To date, NHTSA has only required lap/shoulder seatbelts in school buses that weigh 10,000 pounds or less. Meanwhile, it recommends the occupant restraint systems but only when a school district can afford to purchase and install them.
“There is no more precious cargo than school-aged children entrusted by their parents for a ride to school. The commonsense measures recommended by the NTSB and called for in this legislation will save young lives,” Cohen said in a statement. “We’ve seen too many deaths and serious injuries in school bus accidents in Tennessee and elsewhere, and it is past time we act to save young lives.”
NTSB applauded the School Bus Safety Act reintroduction.
“School buses are often touted as the safest vehicles on our roads, and yet the NTSB continues to investigate crashes that result in preventable fatalities and injuries involving children, adults who accompany them, and other road users,” said NTSB Chair Jennifer Homendy. “Every school bus crash serves as a painful reminder of the cost of inaction. … The NTSB will not rest until the number of lives lost to school bus tragedies is zero.”
In addition to seatbelts, the bill would require automatic emergency braking, electronic stability controls, event data recorders, firewalls separating the engine compartment from the passenger compartment, and fire suppression systems for engine fires.
Duckworth was joined by Sen. Sherrod Brown of Ohio in reintroducing the bill in the Senate last September. It has remained in the Committee on Commerce, Science and Transportation.
In this photo from July 2021, a person stands next to the U.S.-Mexico border barrier in Tijuana, Mexico, painted with a mural depicting people who arrived in the U.S. illegally as children and were deported as adults. (Mario Tama | Getty Images)
Swing state voters, including in Wisconsin, favor a number of immigration policy changes, according to a new survey. “Mass deportation” — promised by the Republican candidate for president, former President Donald Trump — isn’t one of them.
The survey isn’t aimed at simply taking the public’s immediate temperature on issues at the top of the political agenda, however.
Produced by theProgram for Public Consultation at the University of Maryland, it’s part of a project that asks people how they want to see various social and civic problems solved after they are informed about the details and pros and cons of various options.
Program for Public Consultation Director Steven Kull. (Photo courtesy Kull)
The goal “is to give the public a greater voice, bring the public to the table, give them a meaningful understanding of the issues [and] widen the range of issues that they can engage with and articulate their views on,” program director Steven Kull said in an interview.
The process helps counteract public misinformation about subjects, at least among poll participants, Kull said. It also aims to open people’s minds to opposing arguments for policies. “People often can go inside silos and not hear arguments on both sides,” he said.
Kull believes surveys that simply ask a person’s opinion on a policy proposal fall short unless they make room for people to fully consider context: the nature of the problem itself and the potential consequences of various options. Those surveys also don’t adequately engage the public in thinking about and helping to shape effective policy, he contends.
Simply asking the public’s opinion of “mass deportation” of immigrants who are in the U.S. without legal status is an example.
“What it exactly means is not very clear,” Kull said. “It’s just kind of a feeling statement.”
Letting the public assess options
Addressing the impending shortfall in the Social Security system offers another illustration.
Asked about raising the retirement age or raising the payroll tax that funds the program, most people are likely to give a thumbs-down to both options, Kull said — while at the same time affirming that they want Social Security to remain viable.
“And you put those together and you go, ‘Oh, the public’s a big baby. They don’t really understand these things. And it’s third rail, better stay away from it,’” Kull said.
By contrast, the Program for Public Consultation’s survey began with a presentation of alternatives for dealing withSocial Security’s threatened insolvency. Survey participants were then asked about those alternatives — including combining several as part of an overall solution.
“We presented all the options and told them what the effects would be of each one, and evaluated arguments pro and con,” Kull said. “There were majorities that did address the Social Security shortfall effectively and made hard decisions.”
Going against stereotype, “Democrats cut benefits, Republicans raised taxes,” he added. “And there was actually a remarkable amount of convergence.”
The proposed benefit cuts in the survey were for the highest 20% of earners, and the tax increase consisted of gradually raising the payroll tax from 6.2% to 6.5% of income, as well as subjecting income over $400,000 to the payroll tax, currently capped at $169,000.
The Program for Public Consultation has been conducting surveys over the last several months on subjects that have been at the forefront of the 2024 election campaigns. The surveys have included national samples as well as samples from six battleground states in the presidential race.
Kull said the policy simulations at the heart of the program present issues in language comprehensible to someone with a high school education. Alternatives are also reviewed by proponents and opponents of each proposal.
A survey reported in early September examined public response onabortion rights. It showed majorities opposed criminalizing abortion, although Democrats and Republicans differed in the percentage taking that position.
Focusing on immigration
The immigration survey released Thursday asks participants to consider how to address the presence of 11 million immigrants in the U.S. without any legal status. Trump and other Republican candidates have sought to center undocumented immigrants, often with misleading or false claims about crime, and Trump has emphasized his intention to conduct a mass deportation of immigrants if he’s elected.
The survey reviewed various policy alternatives. Among them were provisions from the2013 immigration reform legislation that passed the U.S. Senate on a bipartisan 68-32 vote but died in the House of Representatives.
“All the main elements are here, and they all get pretty robust majority support, and most of it bipartisan,” Kull said.
The survey’s proposed “path to legal citizenship” describes the creation of a new visa for undocumented immigrants already in the U.S. who meet certain conditions. The visa would allow them to apply for citizenship after several years.
The survey projects that removing 11 million immigrants without legal status from the U.S. would cost $100 billion or more.
Given those descriptions, 63% of Wisconsinites in the survey preferred the path to citizenship over deportation. That included 77% of Democrats and 41% of Republicans.
Overall 25% of Wisconsinites in the survey favored mass deportation, including 14% of Democrats and 36% of Republicans. The remaining 11% of Wisconsin participants (12% of Republicans and 9% of Democrats) favored neither alternative.
The survey’s Wisconsin sample consisted of 605 people.
Bipartisan agreement — sometimes
While the strength of support or opposition to those and other policy options varied from state to state, survey participants in five other swing states and the national survey sample all favored the path to citizenship over mass deportation, although support from Democrats was higher.
Similar bipartisan majorities favor hiring more Border Patrol agents, requiring employers to use E-Verify to confirm all hires are legally allowed to work in the U.S. and increasing the number of work visas that would allow migrant workers to enter the U.S. legally.
Some policies show a partisan division, at least in some states. A majority of Wisconsin Republicans — 54% — oppose hiring more immigration judges to reduce the backlog of applicants seeking asylum, while 76% of Democrats support that option. Overall, 61% of Wisconsinites in the survey were in favor.
Building more walls on the border — which survey participants are told would cost about $25 billion — was favored by 55% of Wisconsinites overall, and by 76% of Wisconsin Republicans. It was opposed by 54% of Democrats
Members of the public can visit the program website and go through thepolicymaking simulation themselves. It is available in English and Spanish.
The program’s swing state survey findings might not be able to predict how people will vote on the issues in the coming election, but Kull said he doesn’t believe simpler surveys are able to do that reliably, either.
“The response to the question, ‘Do you favor or oppose mass deportation?’ doesn’t really give us anything,” he said. “It can just be people kind of reacting randomly.”
For Kull, the survey findings suggest a common theme in the concerns that participants have about immigration.
“The public is frustrated that the process is in this kind of chaos,” he said. In the survey, “there’s basically support for every step that assimilates the process into a legal framework.”
Ryan & Tony examine the newly released fourth round of EPA Clean School Bus funding in light of how the school bus industry is responding to clean bus money. Additionally, STN’s October magazine on leadership is out, California passed a student cell phone ban, and Hurricane Helene impacts the southeastern U.S.
Betsey Helfrich, special education lawyer and upcoming TSD Conference keynote speaker, joins Ryan for a lively discussion with perspectives on current stories, trends and legal developments that student transporters should know when providing care to students with special needs.
Distracting cell phones in California classrooms could be a thing of the past in less than two years as Gov. Gavin Newsom signed bipartisan legislation into law that requires school districts to set policies on banning the communications devices used by students during the school day.
Assembly Bill 3216, the Phone-Free School Act, was introduced in February and became law on Monday, with an effective date of July 1, 2026. California is the fifth state to pass a law requiring school districts to adopt usage policies. Three other states — Florida, Louisiana and South Carolina — have laws that place outright restrictions, with exceptions for emergencies or when required by students with Individualized Education Programs.
While the California law does not specifically address use of cell phones and communications devices on school buses, the development and adoption of policies are “to limit or prohibit the use by its pupils of smartphones while the pupils are at a schoolsite or while the pupils are under the supervision and control of an employee or employees of that school district, county office of education, or charter school.”
Each policy must also be updated every five years.
The law makes exceptions, such as allowing students to use cell phones during emergencies or when there is a perceived threat. It builds on a 2019 law that gave school districts the authority to regulate smartphone use, but the new law is more comprehensive.
The bill states the goal of the policies being “to promote evidence-based use of smartphone practices to support pupil learning and well-being.”
Research supports the legislation. A Pew Research Center survey revealed that 72 percent of high school teachers and 33 percent of middle school teachers view cell phones as a significant distraction. Additionally, Common Sense Media found that 97 percent of students admitted to using their phones during school hours, with usage averaging 43 minutes per day.
Global evidence further validates the need for such policies. A study from the London School of Economics found that schools that banned phones saw a 6 percent improvement in test scores, with the most significant gains among lower-performing students. AB 3216 also cites national school cell phone bans in France and Spain over the past decade.
Similarly, a Rutgers University study found that students who used their phones during lectures performed worse on exams, and even students who did not use their phones but were in classrooms where phone use was allowed experienced lower test scores (Rutgers study). This suggests that the mere presence of phones in a classroom disrupts the learning environment for everyone.
A University of Nebraska study found that students admitted to checking their phones an average of 11 times per day during class, contributing to a significant reduction in attention and engagement. The survey of 675 students across 26 states revealed that nearly 20 percent of classroom time is spent on non-class-related activities, such as texting, browsing social media, and playing games. Over 80 percent of respondents admitted that their digital habits negatively impacted their learning, yet many found it difficult to change their behavior.
By restricting cell phone use, Gov. Newsom said California aims to create an environment that prioritizes student learning and well-being, free from the interruptions of smartphones and social media.
The state’s push for stricter cell phone regulations in schools has been in the works for years. In 2019, Newsom signed Assembly Bill 272, which gave districts the authority to regulate smartphone use during school hours. However, rising concerns about student mental health and academic performance prompted further action, culminating in the passage of Assembly Bill 3216.
While state schools superintendent Tony Thurman, the California Teachers Association and Los Angles Unified School District — which approved its own ban over the summer — supported AB 3216, the California School Boards Association opposed it.
“This bill limits the decision-making authority of the governing board as they would now have to adopt a policy, even if, through local community meetings, it was found that there was no need to limit/prohibit the usage,” CSBA wrote in opposition. “These decisions are best made at the local level by people who understand, reside, are invested in, and accountable to the communities they serve.”
According to Education Week, the other states with policy laws similar to California are Indiana, Minnesota, Ohio, and Virginia. States with school board resolutions or laws recommending school district policies are Alabama, Connecticut, Oklahoma and Washington. States incentivizing pilot programs are Arkansas, Delaware and Pennsylvania. Arizona state schools chief Tom Horne last month called for legislation to ban student cell phones.
Read more on student cellphone bans nationwide and their implication on the school bus ride in the October magazine edition.
Voters in Grand Rapids, Mich., cast their ballots during the state’s August primary
7 States + 5 Issues That Will Swing the 2024 Election
GRAND RAPIDS, Mich. — Some voters are already casting early ballots in the first presidential election since the global pandemic ended and former President Donald Trump refused to accept his defeat.
This year’s presidential election won’t be decided by a margin of millions of votes, but likely by thousands in the seven tightly contested states of Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, North Carolina, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin.
How legislatures, courts and election boards have reshaped ballot access in those states in the past four years could make a difference. Some of those states, especially Michigan, cemented the temporary pandemic-era measures that allowed for more mail-in and early voting. But other battleground states have passed laws that may keep some registered voters from casting ballots.
Trump and his allies have continued to spread lies about the 2020 results, claiming without evidence that widespread voter fraud stole the election from him. That has spurred many Republican lawmakers in states such as Arizona, Georgia and North Carolina to reel back access to early and mail-in voting and add new identification requirements to vote. And in Pennsylvania, statewide appellate courts are toggling between rulings.
“The last four years have been a long, strange trip,” said Hannah Fried, co-founder and executive director of All Voting is Local, a multistate voting rights organization.
“Rollbacks were almost to an instance tied to the ‘big lie,’” she added, referring to Trump’s election conspiracy theories. “And there have been many, many positive reforms for voters in the last few years that have gone beyond what we saw in the COVID era.”
The volume of election-related legislation and court cases that emerged over the past four years has been staggering.
Nationally, the Voting Rights Lab, a nonpartisan group that researches election law changes, tracked 6,450 bills across the country that were introduced since 2021 that sought to alter the voting process. Hundreds of those bills were enacted.
Justin Levitt, a professor at Loyola Law School in Los Angeles, cautioned that incremental tweaks to election law — especially last-minute changes made by the courts — not only confuse voters, but also put a strain on local election officials who must comply with changes to statute as they prepare for another highly scrutinized voting process.
“Any voter that is affected unnecessarily is too many in my book,” he said.
New restrictions
In many ways, the 2020 presidential election is still being litigated four years later.
Swing states have been the focus of legal challenges and new laws spun from a false narrative that questioned election integrity. The 2021 state legislative sessions, many begun in the days following the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol, brought myriad legislative changes that have made it more difficult to vote and altered how ballots are counted and rejected.
The highest profile measure over the past four years came out of Georgia.
Under a 2021 law, Georgia residents now have less time to ask for mail-in ballots and must put their driver’s license or state ID information on those requests. The number of drop boxes has been limited. And neither election officials nor nonprofits may send unsolicited mail-in ballot applications to voters.
Republican Gov. Brian Kemp said when signing the measure that it would ensure free and fair elections in the state, but voting rights groups lambasted the law as voter suppression.
That law also gave Georgia’s State Election Board more authority to interfere in the makeup of local election boards. The state board[AS1]has made recent headlines for paving the way for counties to potentially refuse to certify the upcoming election. This comes on top of a wave of voter registration challenges from conservative activists.
In North Carolina, the Republican-led legislature last year overrode Democratic Gov. Roy Cooper’s veto to enact measures that shortened the time to turn in mail-in ballots; required local election officials to reject ballots if voters who register to vote on Election Day do not later verify their home address; and required identification to vote by mail.
This will also be the first general election that North Carolinians will have to comply with a 2018 voter ID measure that was caught up in the court system until the state Supreme Court reinstated the law last year.
And in Arizona, the Republican-led legislature pushed through a measure[AS2] that shortened the time voters have to correct missing or mismatched signatures on their absentee ballot envelopes. Then-Gov. Doug Ducey, a Republican, signed the measure.
“Look, sometimes the complexity is the point,” said Fried, of All Voting is Local. “If you are passing a law that makes it this complicated for somebody to vote or to register to vote, what’s your endgame here? What are you trying to do?”
Laws avoided major overhauls
But the restrictions could have gone much further.
That’s partly because Democratic governors, such as Arizona’s Katie Hobbs, who took office in 2023, have vetoed many of the Republican-backed bills. But it’s also because of how popular early voting methods have become.
Arizonans, for example, have been able to vote by mail for more than three decades. More than 75% of Arizonan voters requested mail-in ballots in 2022, and 90% of voters in 2020 cast their ballots by mail.
This year, a bill that would have scrapped no-excuse absentee voting passed the state House but failed to clear a Republican-controlled Senate committee.
Bridget Augustine, a high school English teacher in Glendale, Arizona, and a registered independent, has been a consistent early voter since 2020. She said the first time she voted in Arizona was by absentee ballot while she was a college student in New Jersey, and she has no concerns “whatsoever” about the safety of early voting in Arizona.
“I just feel like so much of this rhetoric was drummed up as a way to make it easier to lie about the election and undermine people’s confidence,” she said.
Vanessa Jiminez, the security manager for a Phoenix high school district, a registered independent and an early voter, said she is confident in the safety of her ballot.
“I track my ballot every step of the way,” she said.
Ben Ginsberg, a longtime Republican election lawyer and Volker Distinguished Visiting Fellow at the think tank Hoover Institution, said that while these laws may add new hurdles, he doesn’t expect them to change vote totals.
“The bottom line is I don’t think that the final result in any election is going to be impacted by a law that’s been passed,” he said on a recent call with reporters organized by the Knight Foundation, a Miami-based nonprofit that provides grants to support democracy and journalism.
Major expansions
No state has seen a bigger expansion to ballot access over the past four years than Michigan.
Republicans tried to curtail access to absentee voting, introducing 39 bills in 2021, when the party still was in charge of both legislative chambers.
Two GOP bills passed, but Democratic Gov. Gretchen Whitmer vetoed them.
The next year, Michigan voters approved ballot measures that added nine days of early voting. The measures also allowed voters to request mail-in ballots online; created a permanent vote-by-mail list; provided prepaid postage on absentee ballot applications and ballots; increased ballot drop boxes; and allowed voters to correct missing or mismatched signatures on mail-in ballot envelopes.
“When you take it to the people and actually ask them about it, it turns out most people want more voting access,” said Melinda Billingsley, communications manager for Voters Not Politicians, a Lansing, Michigan-based voting rights advocacy group.
“The ballot access expansions happened in spite of an anti-democratic, Republican-led push to restrict ballot access,” she said.
In 2021, then-Nevada Gov. Steve Sisolak, a Democrat, signed into law a measure that transitioned the state into a universal vote-by-mail system. Every registered voter would be sent a ballot in the mail before an election, unless they opt out. The bill made permanent a temporary expansion of mail-in voting that the state put in place during the pandemic.
In February’s presidential preference primary, 78% of ballots cast were ballots by mail or in a ballot drop box, according to the Nevada secretary of state’s office. In June’s nonpresidential primary, 65% of ballots were mail-in ballots. And in the 2022 general election, 51% of ballots cast were mail ballots.
Last-minute court decisions
Drop boxes weren’t controversial in Wisconsin until Trump became fixated on them as an avenue for alleged voter fraud, said Jeff Mandell, general counsel and co-founder of Law Forward, a Madison-based nonprofit legal organization.
For half of a century, Wisconsinites could return their absentee ballots in the same drop boxes that counties and municipalities used for water bills and property taxes, he said. But when the pandemic hit and local election officials expected higher volumes of absentee ballots, they installed larger boxes.
After Trump lost the state by fewer than 21,000 votes in 2020, drop boxes became a flashpoint. Republican leaders claimed drop boxes were not secure, and that nefarious people could tamper with the ballots. In 2022, the Wisconsin Supreme Court, then led by a conservative majority, banned drop boxes.
But that ruling would only last two years. In July, the new liberal majority in the state’s high court reversed the ruling and said localities could determine whether to use drop boxes. It was a victory for voters, Mandell said.
With U.S. Postal Service delays stemming from the agency’s restructuring, drop boxes provide a faster method of returning a ballot without having to worry about it showing up late, he said. Ballots must get in by 8 p.m. on Election Day. The boxes are especially convenient for rural voters, who may have a clerk’s office or post office with shorter hours, he added.
“Every way that you make it easy for people to vote safely and securely is good,” Mandell said.
After the high court’s ruling, local officials had to make a swift decision about whether to reinstall drop boxes.
Milwaukee city employees were quickly dispatched throughout the city to remove the leather bags that covered the drop boxes for two years, cleaned them all and repaired several, said Paulina Gutierrez, executive director of the City of Milwaukee Election Commission.
“There’s an all-hands-on-deck mentality here at the city,” she said, adding that there are cameras pointed at each drop box.
Although it used a drop box in 2020, Marinette, a community on the western shore of Green Bay, opted not to use them for the August primary and asked voters to hand the ballots to clerk staff. Lana Bero, the city clerk, said the city may revisit that decision before November.
New Berlin Clerk Rubina Medina said her community, a city of about 40,000 on the outskirts of Milwaukee, had some security concerns about potentially tampering or destruction of ballots within drop boxes, and therefore decided not to use the boxes this year.
Dane County Clerk Scott McDonell, who serves the state capital of Madison and its surrounding area, has been encouraging local clerks in his county to have a camera on their drop boxes and save the videos in case residents have fraud concerns.
A risk of confusing voters
Many local election officials in Wisconsin say they worry that court decisions, made mere months before the November election, could create confusion for voters and more work for clerks.
“These decisions are last-second, over and over again,” McDonell said. “You’re killing us when you do that.”
Arizonans and Pennsylvanians now know that late-in-the-game scramble too.
In August, the U.S. Supreme Court reinstated part of a 2022 Arizona law that requires documented proof of citizenship to register on state forms, potentially impacting tens of thousands of voters, disproportionately affecting young and Native voters.
Whether Pennsylvania election officials should count mail ballots returned with errors has been a subject of litigation in every election since 2020. State courts continue to grapple with the question, and neither voting rights groups nor national Republicans show signs of giving up.
Former Pennsylvania Secretary of the Commonwealth Kathy Boockvar, who is now president of Athena Strategies and working on voting rights and election security issues across the country, said voters simply need to ignore the noise of litigation and closely follow the instructions with their mail ballots.
“Litigation is confusing,” Boockvar said. “The legislature won’t fix it by legislation. Voter education is the key thing here, and the instructions on the envelopes need to be as clear and simple as possible.”
To avoid confusion, voters can make a plan for how and when they will vote by going to vote.gov, a federally run site where voters can check to make sure they are properly registered and to answer questions in more than a dozen languages about methods for casting a ballot.
Arizona Mirror’s Caitlin Sievers and Jim Small, Nevada Current’s April Corbin Girnus and Pennsylvania Capital-Star’s Peter Hall contributed reporting.
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