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State of Election Administration Legislation 2025 Year-End Report: Executive summary
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Past reports |
Absentee/mail-in voting • Early voting • Electoral systems • Voting rights for convicted felons • Private funding • Primary systems • Redistricting • Voter identification |
December 16, 2025
By Ballotpedia staff
Executive summary
2025 has been another year of significant state legislative activity related to election and voting policies. As of Dec. 10, Ballotpedia has tracked 4,969 election-related bills and resolutions—surpassing the total number of bills in any year since we began tracking election legislation in 2022. Lawmakers approved more than 600 new laws in 2025, the second most of any year in that time period. As in previous years, Republican lawmakers and Republican trifecta states have driven most of this activity. This trend reflects both their advantage in legislative control—holding majorities in 57 of the 99 state legislative chambers—and greater control of state governments in general, with 23 trifectas compared to 15 for Democrats.
In 2025, Republican lawmakers passed laws to:
- Implement checks of voters’ citizenship status through new data sources,
- Require absentee/mail-in ballots to arrive by Election Day to be counted,
- Ban ranked-choice voting (RCV), and
- Increase the signature requirement for initiatives to reach the ballot and raise the vote thresholds to approve those amendments once there.
Democratic lawmakers have passed laws to:
- Establish state level voting rights acts (VRAs) that grant a private right of action to enforce election laws,
- Expand automatic voter registration services,
- Provide language accommodations for voting materials and services, and
- Increase drop box availability and security measures.
While election law changes can be contentious, lawmakers have still found common ground. Bipartisan efforts have advanced legislation to:
- Align election dates,
- Revise ballot access rules for candidates,
- Increase the frequency of some voter list maintenance activities, and
- Update ballot processing procedures to speed up election results.
Finally, congressional redistricting emerged as a topic of focus in the final months of the year. Since Aug. 29, five states—including three with Republican trifectas—passed legislation creating new congressional maps for the 2026 elections, or submitting new maps for voter approval. Before this year, only two states had voluntarily adopted new congressional maps between censuses since 1970.
This report covers election-related legislative activity in 2025 state legislative sessions. Unless otherwise noted, all figures are current as of December 10, 2025.
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 and Andrew Bahl are staff writers on Ballotpedia's Law Team.
Law Team Managing Editor Janie Valentine reviewed the report and provided feedback, as did Senior Editor Norm Leahy, and Associate Director of Features Cory Eucalitto.
See also
- Ballotpedia's Election Administration Legislation Tracker
- About Ballotpedia's Election Administration Legislation Tracker
- Voting laws in the United States
- Election Policy
