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State of Election Administration Legislation 2024 Year-End Report: About the tracker and methodology
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Absentee/mail-in voting • Early voting • Electoral systems • Voting rights for convicted felons • Private funding • Primary systems • Redistricting • Voter identification |
December 12, 2024
By Ballotpedia staff
About Ballotpedia’s Election Administration Legislation Tracker
Ballotpedia launched our Election Administration Legislation Tracker in June 2022. The tracker is a best-in-class resource to help voters, journalists, researchers, and activists quickly and easily track election-related legislation through a portal on our website. This user-friendly tracker houses thousands of election-related bills and organizes them by topic with neutral, expert analysis from Ballotpedia’s election administration researchers.
In addition to providing daily updates on the bills we track, we summarize each bill in neutral language for a general audience and add category tags that allow for trend analysis. We also publish a weekly email, Ballotpedia’s Ballot Bulletin, that delivers the latest updates on election policy, and release a monthly State of Election Administration Legislation Roundup that curates notable election policy developments from state legislatures.
Methodology
Ballotpedia’s comprehensive Election Administration Legislation Tracker is the basis for the data and analysis in this report.
Using the tracker, we capture election-related legislation across all 50 state legislatures and provide real-time updates as bills progress. To do this, we use:
- Automated keyword searches
- Manual bill review
- Real-time refinements based on keyword results and news monitoring
Once relevant bills are identified and added to the tracker, our team manually reviews each bill, categorizes each bill by policy area, and summarizes each bill in neutral, easy-to-understand language.
Our bill tagging system — which includes 133 tags in 20 policy areas — allows us to track policy changes and analyze trends in election-related legislation. We use the tracker to identify key topics, analyze partisan behavior, and tease out the emerging issues that will be in the spotlight in sessions to come.
Trifectas
The political makeup of a state’s government affects the state’s election policy. State government trifecta is a term to describe single-party government when one political party holds the governorship and majorities in both chambers of the state legislature.
In 2024, there were 23 Republican trifectas, 17 Democratic trifectas, and 12 divided governments where neither party held trifecta control. Two Democratic trifectas, in Michigan and Minnesota, were lost as a result of the 2024 general elections, but these states are counted as Democratic trifectas throughout the report.
This map shows the trifecta status of each state throughout 2024:
Ballotpedia's Election Administration Legislation Tracker
State election laws are changing. Keeping track of the latest developments in all 50 states can seem like an impossible job.
Here's the solution: Ballotpedia's Election Administration Legislation Tracker.
Ballotpedia's Election Administration Tracker sets the industry standard for ease of use, flexibility, and raw power. But that's just the beginning of what it can do:
- Ballotpedia's election experts provide daily updates on bills and other relevant political developments.
- We translate complex bill text into easy-to-understand summaries written in everyday language.
- And because it's from Ballotpedia, our Tracker is guaranteed to be neutral, unbiased, and nonpartisan.
About the authors
Joe Greaney is a staff writer on Ballotpedia's Marquee Team.
Ballotpedia Editor in Chief Geoff Pallay reviewed the report and provided feedback, as did Managing Editor Cory Eucalitto and Marquee Team Lead Janie Valentine.
See also
- Ballotpedia's Election Administration Legislation Tracker
- About Ballotpedia's Election Administration Legislation Tracker
- Voting laws in the United States
- Election Policy
