Posted on Saturday, May 10, 2025
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by Outside Contributor
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Even in non-election years, improving election integrity is a winning issue for state legislators. Proof of their interest is in the laws adopted by several states in the early months of 2025, laws that have produced considerable improvements in how those states secure and manage their elections.
Since 2021, The Heritage Foundation has been tracking the laws of every state (and the District of Columbia) governing the conduct of elections—local, state, and federal—and ranking them in its Election Integrity Scorecard. With the latest round of updates, recognition is due to Arkansas, Utah, West Virginia, and Wyoming for their legislative improvements.
Utah made the largest strides, improving by a total of eight points. Utah’s Legislature addressed several important issues affecting the accuracy of the state’s voter rolls. The state now uses the Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlement Program and jury questionnaires to identify noncitizens who have registered to vote. It also adopted procedures for investigating anomalies in the number of individuals registered at a single address and the validity of a voter registration when an absentee ballot is returned as undeliverable.
Importantly, Utah has moved away from the practice of automatically mailing absentee ballots. By 2029, voters who are eligible for mail-in ballots will have to request them.
Wyoming’s new legislation earned it an impressive five-point gain on the Election Integrity Scorecard. Like Utah, Wyoming has adopted the Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlement Program to help officials identify noncitizens who register to vote. Additionally, Wyoming passed a ban on all private funding of the elections, a practice that certain well-heeled groups have used as a partisan device for driving voter turnout in urban districts.
The state also passed a formal ban on ranked choice voting, the controversial practice of instructing voters to pick multiple candidates and then reallocating the votes to produce an artificial majority.
West Virginia, for its part, directed state election officials to remove a registration from the state’s voter rolls when comparisons with other state agency databases reveal that the registration is duplicative or otherwise invalid.
Finally, Arkansas earned a point for requiring an additional witness whenever a care facility administrator assists a resident of that facility with marking a ballot. That brings Arkansas’ total improvement on the year to two points, putting the state among the nation’s best performers at No. 6 overall.
Happily, no state has declined in its overall score through this point in 2025, though it should be remembered that we cannot award a state any less than zero points per question even if the state persists in making counterproductive choices.
States with part-time legislatures will soon be winding down their sessions. But time remains for legislators to make the security of future elections a present priority. Given the progress of the last few months, we can reasonably hope to see more such improvements this year.
Jack Fitzhenry is a legal fellow in The Heritage Foundation’s Meese Center for Legal and Judicial Studies.
Reprinted with permission from The Daily Signal by Jack Fitzhenry.
The opinions expressed by columnists are their own and do not necessarily represent the views of AMAC or AMAC Action.
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