Report

Four Essential Steps States Can Take to Safeguard Our Elections

One of the most pressing threats to our elections is the likelihood that bad-faith actors will attempt to overturn results that do not favor them. 

This report describes four critical steps that state leaders can take now to protect their elections from political manipulation and ensure that the final results reflect the will of American voters:

1. Maintain accurate and up-to-date voter registration lists.
2. Deliver preliminary election results in a timely manner.
3. Test and verify election results to ensure accuracy.
4. Ensure verified results are certified on time.

Step 1: Maintain accurate and up-to-date voter registration lists.

 Challenges to election results often rely on issues (some real, some perceived) with voter registration lists. Perhaps the most publicized of these efforts was Judge Jefferson Griffin’s reliance on incomplete voter registration data in his months-long attempt to overturn the results of North Carolina’s 2024 state Supreme Court race. Frivolous mass challenges to voter registration lists, as seen leading up to the 2022 midterm elections in Georgia, can sow distrust and set the stage for challenges after Election Day. These challenges also consume the limited time of understaffed election offices, potentially compromising the registration of eligible voters.

States can mitigate these challenges by strengthening vulnerabilities in their list maintenance practices and ensuring accurate and up-to-date lists. Best practices include:

• Requiring regular, frequent maintenance, including removing voters who have become ineligible (due to address change or death, for example).
• Streamlining access to up-to-date, accurate data, including motor vehicle records, vital records, and court records.
• Participating in reliable multi-state data sharing through the Electronic Registration Information Center (ERIC).
• Protecting against erroneous removals by providing voters with notice and an opportunity to contest their removal before cancelling their registration.
• Preempting frivolous challenges to voters’ eligibility by requiring that individual written challenges be based on personal knowledge of a person’s ineligibility and giving challenged voters a hearing, with the burden of proof on the challenger.
• Requiring public reporting and oversight from state officials to ensure uniformity between localities and increase public understanding and transparency.
• Ensuring no voter removals within 90 days of an election, as required by the National Voter Registration Act. 

Many of these solutions have bipartisan support. For example, in 2023, Florida passed a law requiring data sharing between state agencies and improving the quality of data available to elections officials. Additionally, Ohio counties post a daily “snapshot” of their voter lists on the secretary of state’s website. 

Step 2: Deliver preliminary election results in a timely manner.

Malicious actors often exploit delayed election results to sow doubt about the legitimacy of the results. For example, in 2022, President Trump and his allies attacked Philadelphia election administrators by accusing the locality of fraud in the 2020 election, following the influx of mail ballots and a close race, which caused slower results reporting. Similarly, “slow” results reporting in Arizona became a central talking point in Kari Lake’s failed 2022 gubernatorial bid, as well as her unsuccessful 2024 U.S. Senate bid. Lake accused local officials of intentionally slowing down vote counting to prevent her from being named the winner. 

Delayed results are inevitable in extremely close races where every vote must be counted to determine the winner.

Still, state leaders can decrease the frequency and duration of delays by adopting the following best practices:

• Allowing election officials to verify and pre-process returned mail ballots as they come in. Pre-processing significantly decreases the workload for election officials on Election Day, enabling them to report a high percentage of votes within a few hours of polls closing.
• Providing in-person early voting opportunities ensures that election officials have a large percentage of ballots in their possession before Election Day, decreasing the Election Day workload.
• Providing regular, public updates about the status of the count, such as the numbers of ballots counted, remaining, and pending cure. These updates bolster confidence in the process and set expectations for when unofficial results will be complete.
• Rejecting efforts to mandate the hand-counting of ballots. Research and real-life examples demonstrate that hand-counting all ballots results in a significant increase in both delays and errors. 

These are bipartisan-supported solutions. In the past few years, 17 states (including states like Georgia, Alabama, Kentucky, and Texas) have passed legislation allowing election officials to start processing mail ballots earlier. And all but three states provide early voting opportunities, with over half of states — including North Carolina, Texas, Arizona, and Florida — improving early voting access in recent years. 

Step 3: Test and verify election results to ensure accuracy.

Nearly every state requires some type of audit after the election to verify that the election was conducted in compliance with the law and that ballot counting was accurate. However, the timing and scope of these audits vary significantly between states. When states do not complete their audits until after certification, it creates an opportunity for losing candidates and motivated bad-faith actors to accuse election officials of wrongdoing or call into question the validity and accuracy of the results. Notably, some major battleground states, such as Wisconsin, Michigan, Florida, Nevada, and Ohio, do not complete their audits until after certification.

Even among states with robust audit processes, a lack of transparency and visibility into these practices can lead to claims that additional post-certification audits — often partisan charades conducted by non-experts — are necessary. For example, Arizona’s state legislature pursued a highly partisan “audit” of Maricopa County’s election results following the 2020 election. Conducted by a Florida organization, “Cyber Ninjas,” with no expertise, training, or experience performing election audits, the review fueled false narratives about what was, in fact, a free and fair election. 

States can follow these best practices to ensure accuracy and boost public confidence in the results:

• Complete statewide audits before certification, with each county conducting a partial recount of election results so that certifiers and voters can feel confident that results accurately reflect voter choices.
• Enact strong ballot verification processes, including cure processes that allow election officials to contact voters to correct any irregularities.
• Ensure transparent reporting of audit results to preempt calls for additional, often partisan, post-certification audits.
• Implement voter-verifiable paper trails that allow voters to verify their selections before tabulation to help instill public confidence in the results.

States across the political spectrum follow these best practices. For instance, New Hampshire recently enacted bipartisan legislation creating risk-limiting audits. Florida accelerated audit reporting timelines, and Texas passed legislation on voter-verifiable paper trails to support auditing.  

Step 4: Ensure verified results are certified on time.

In recent years, we’ve seen a growing number of county certifiers refuse to certify legitimate and verified election results. For example, in the days following the 2022 election in Arizona, two out of three members of the Cochise County Board of Supervisors refused to certify the county’s results, as required by state law, despite returns showing an overwhelming margin of victory. The supervisors refused to fulfill their duty to certify the election until a court ordered them to do so. 

Partisan-motivated refusals to certify inject chaos and delays into what should be a straightforward, non-discretionary process. These refusals also fuel distrust in the election results and the system as a whole. They can also prevent newly elected officials from taking office on time. In presidential elections, for example, delays in state and local certification could cause a state to miss the federal certification deadlines established by the Electoral Count Act of 1887. These delays threaten the state’s electoral votes and cause lasting damage to public confidence in American democracy.

States can protect against partisan-motivated refusals to certify by shoring up potential vulnerabilities, including:

• Defining certification as a clear, non-discretionary duty in state statutes.
• Clarifying the enforcement mechanisms to compel certification, both administrative and judicial, including the correct venue for filing and relevant deadlines, timelines, and evidentiary standards.
• Articulating a mechanism for replacing certifiers who fail to fulfill their duty, so state officials have clear authority to compel certification or complete the certification process themselves if a county fails to certify.
• Tightening the certification process by shortening timelines for and narrowing the grounds for certification challenges.
• Protecting against faithless electors by requiring presidential electors to take an oath promising to vote for the candidate who received the most votes, with enforcement mechanisms for those who break this oath.

The good news is that states are taking action to protect their voters from partisan-motivated certifiers who refuse to fulfill their duty. For example, Michigan adopted a state constitutional amendment in 2022 to tighten its certification process after Wayne County canvassers initially refused to certify the results of the 2020 presidential election. Likewise, the Arizona legislature passed bipartisan legislation in 2024 to align the state’s timelines and certification process with new federal deadlines in the Electoral Count Reform Act. 

States Hold the Key to Protecting Our Elections

American elections are based on a simple premise: that every legal vote is counted and that the voters choose their representatives. While this has been the case for generations, in recent election cycles, we’ve seen losing candidates and their allies spread false narratives and exploit vulnerabilities in state laws and procedures to contest election results they do not like. 

This dangerous trend threatens to undermine the longstanding integrity of our elections. The good news is that states have all the necessary policy tools to expose and defeat attempts to manipulate election outcomes — before they gain any ground. States can maintain accurate and up-to-date registration lists. They can enable election officials to report results more quickly, conduct audits before certification, and strengthen guardrails to prevent certification refusals or delays. 

By adopting these best practices, state lawmakers and election administrators across the country can protect and preserve our democracy in 2026.