Since 2025, new laws, executive actions, and federal moves have changed how elections are run and who can vote. And more changes are being pushed, often framed as fraud prevention, though independent research shows fraud is extremely rare. This is what is changing, who it affects, and where you can learn more.
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Section 1 — Making it Harder to Vote or Register
Summary: New voting access impediments interfere with voting by registered voters. New registration rules sound like routine security, but the paperwork burden falls hardest on married women, rural voters, busy working parents, seniors — and anyone who moves, changes their name, or switches political party.
- Limit Early Voting Access. In some southern states, a recent move is to locate ballot drop boxes inside government buildings. Thus, they can be accessed only when the building is open, eliminating the ability to drop off a ballot on the weekend or after work. Less early voting means longer lines at the pools, which means fewer people actually vote.
- Reduce the # of polling places. Texas is considering reducing the # of polling sites in Tarrant county by almost 100! That is ~33% fewer polling locations in a county with 2 million residents and a large minority population. Fewer polling locations means many people must go farther and wait longer to vote. And, because the polling place they went to last time is closed, they may go to the wrong polling location and be turned away, after waiting in line for hours. (The good news here is that the GOP seems to be really scared of James Talarico!)
- Reduce the # of voting machines in precincts with large numbers of black, brown, ethnic, or other populations that the GOP does not want to vote. Incredibly long lines means people must wait 2, 4, 6 hours or more to vote. Precincts with majority white, upper class voters wait only 10-15 minutes to vote.
- Prohibit giving water or food to someone in a voter line. In 2021, the Republican-controlled legislature passed a law (SB 202) which, among other things, made it illegal to give water or food to someone in a voter line. A lawsuit paused that part of the law. But in June 2026, a judge blocked that lawsuit, and the law is now back in force — just in time for the Midterms.
- Mail-in Voting Executive Order (Apr 2026) — major federal-overreach concerns — see Section 2 for detail. Post Office delays have rised since the Trump-appointed Postmaster General instituted new cost-cutting, “efficiency” measures. Across several states, ballots arriving after the “deadline” has risen dramatically, often double previous rates. These votes do NOT get counted.
- SAVE Act — requires proof of citizenship to register, even though — already — only citizens can legally vote. In practice: many married women whose legal name differs from their birth certificate name will need to locate and pay for birth certificates and marriage licenses just to register, as will rural / other voters without easy access to these documents, PLUS anyone who moves, changes their name or their political party! SAVE has failed to pass in the Senate but could return. Vote.org: About the SAVE Act
- Citizenship Proof Executive Order (Mar 2025) — same proof-of-citizenship requirements as the SAVE Act, plus a threat to cut federal funding from states that accept mail ballots that arrive after Election Day. This disproportionately hits rural/military/overseas voters whose ballots routinely take longer to arrive. White House: Executive Order text
- 44 new state voting restrictions have passed since January 2025 — already more than the entire 2021–22 two-year period. At least 19 states enacted 32 laws that make it harder to vote. These add cost and time burdens for existing voters, not just new registrants. Brennan Center: State Voting Laws Roundup
These laws are consistently framed as closing fraud loopholes but, as the fraud-rate research in Section 3 shows, that justification doesn’t hold up to scrutiny. The practical effect is fewer eligible voters able to vote easily, not less fraud.
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Section 2 — Federal Encroachment on Voter Privacy and States’ Constitutional Authority
Summary: Attempting to encroach on States’ authority over elections, while a federal data grab raises separate alarms.
- Voter data collection — DOJ and DHS have requested state voter rolls, including sensitive personal information like driver’s license numbers and partial Social Security numbers; 19 states have complied so far. It is building the kind of centralized personal-data infrastructure that has enabled repression in other countries. Brennan Center: Tracker
- Mail-in Voting Executive Order — directs the Postal Service to control distribution of mail-in ballots. This is an unprecedented federal encroachment on states’ constitutional authority to run their own elections, as outlined in the Constitution. Civil rights groups and state attorneys general are suing, arguing that election rules are a state and Congressional authority, not the President’s. Campaign Legal Center: Lawsuit details
- Government personnel changes — at least 75 career election-security officials at DHS/DOJ have been replaced by political appointees, some previously active in the “election-denial” movement. ProPublica: Full report
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Section 3 — Is Voter Fraud Actually a Problem?
Summary: An independent review of the most-cited “fraud” database found voter fraud is vanishingly rare — undercutting the justification for the restrictions above.
The Brennan Center analyzed the Heritage Foundation’s widely-cited Fraud Database — the source often invoked to justify new voting restrictions — and found voter fraud occurs at extremely low rates. Brennan Center: Full assessment
Bottom Line: These Threats Are a Pattern, Not Isolated
These actions map onto categories political scientists use to describe how democracies have weakened elsewhere — Hungary, Russia, Turkey, Venezuela:
- Election rules changed to make voting more burdensome for existing voters
- Federal power overriding states’ constitutional authority over elections
- Centralized personal-data infrastructure of the kind that has enabled repression elsewhere
Each action is framed as necessary to prevent fraud, but independent research shows voter fraud is extremely rare (Section 3), undermining that justification.
No two countries follow the same path, and scholars disagree on how far any comparison extends, but the shape — incremental changes that individually seem defensible and accumulate over time — is what researchers watch for. See Threats to Democracy for the full framework, including how it connects to other current federal actions beyond voting.