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With fewer than six months until November’s midterm elections, a fierce legal and legislative tug-of-war over who can vote — and how — is playing out across the country with extraordinary intensity. The Brennan Center for Justice documented at least 302 restrictive voting bills moving through state legislatures in 2026, while an equally ambitious push to expand ballot access moved through at least 42 states. The result is an electoral landscape more contested in the courts and capitols than at any point since the immediate aftermath of the 2020 presidential election.
The Restrictive Wave: Nine States, Twelve New Barriers
Between January 1 and May 1, 2026, at least nine states — Florida, Kansas, Kentucky, Mississippi, Nebraska, New Hampshire, South Dakota, Utah, and West Virginia — enacted 12 restrictive voting laws. Nine of those measures will be in force when voters go to the polls in November, potentially affecting millions of registered voters in key midterm battleground states.
The most sweeping changes came in South Dakota and Utah, where lawmakers now require all citizens to present documentary proof of citizenship — a passport or birth certificate — in order to register to vote. Florida, Kentucky, and Mississippi imposed similar documentary requirements on subsets of their electorates. Collectively, these laws represent a significant escalation in the documentary verification regime surrounding voter registration, a process that voting rights advocates argue creates disproportionate barriers for low-income voters, naturalized citizens, and voters who have moved frequently.
The cumulative effect is stark. Including the 32 restrictive laws enacted in 2025, states have now passed 44 restrictive voting laws during the current two-year election cycle — surpassing the previous record of 43 set during the 2021–2022 cycle. States including Arizona, Arkansas, Idaho, Indiana, Kansas, Louisiana, Montana, Texas, and Wyoming have each enacted five or more restrictive laws since 2021, forming a bloc of states where the cumulative effect of successive restrictions may reshape the electorate in measurable ways before November.
“The explosion of restrictive voting legislation that began after the 2020 election has turned into a regular feature of the election landscape, with well over a hundred such laws enacted in the past five years.” — Brennan Center for Justice, May 2026
The Expansive Counterwave: Six States Push Back
Against this backdrop, at least six states — Maryland, Nebraska, New Hampshire, New Jersey, Virginia, and Washington — enacted 16 expansive voting laws during the same January–May window, 14 of which will be active for the November midterm. Virginia, in particular, led the nation with six expansive laws already on the books and at least two more awaiting the governor’s signature as of early May.
These expansive measures vary in scope but tend to share a common architecture: automatic voter registration, same-day registration, extended early voting windows, and online registration portals. In states where these laws are layered on top of existing infrastructure, advocates argue the cumulative effect could offset some of the suppressive impact of restrictive laws in neighboring jurisdictions — particularly in competitive midterm states where turnout margins often determine outcomes.
Election Security Laws: A第三条路
Perhaps the most underreported trend in the 2026 voting rights landscape is the wave of election security legislation moving through state capitols. At least seven states — Maine, Oregon, South Dakota, Tennessee, Utah, Vermont, and Wyoming — enacted laws specifically designed to bolster the integrity of the electoral process, improve ballot security, regulate post-election audits, prohibit AI-generated electoral misinformation, and prevent voter intimidation at polling places.
Many of these measures focus specifically on curbing the presence of federal law enforcement officers at polling locations without valid cause, a response to documented concerns about immigration enforcement operations near voting sites. Several states enacted or strengthened existing protections against interference by outside actors — whether federal agencies seeking voter roll data or private actors deploying automated disinformation systems in the final weeks of a campaign.
Multiple states are pushing back against the threat of federal interference by refusing to hand over their voters’ data, enacting laws designed to guard against such interference, and strengthening existing election security measures.
The Federal Dimension: SAVE Act Fails, But Executive Orders Linger
At the federal level, the proposed SAVE Act — which would have required every American to present a passport or birth certificate to register to vote — failed to advance in the Senate amid widespread public opposition. The defeat represented a significant setback for restrictive voting advocates who had hoped to embed documentary proof-of-citizenship requirements into federal law.
However, President Trump’s executive order directing the U.S. Postal Service to essentially determine who receives mail-in ballots represents a parallel threat operating through the administrative state rather than through legislation. The Brennan Center and multiple civil rights organizations are challenging that order in federal court, and its resolution — or lack thereof — before November could further complicate an already complex voting access landscape.
Election officials in at least 15 states have already complied with federal requests for unredacted voter information. Meanwhile, state legislatures in several of those same states are weighing bills that would explicitly prohibit officials from sharing voters’ personal data with federal agencies — creating a direct conflict between state law and federal directive that may ultimately land before a federal judge.
What This Means for November
The aggregate picture is one of a deeply fragmented electoral governance regime. Voters in different states will navigate radically different rules on everything from registration deadlines to documentary requirements to early voting windows — rules that, in many cases, were written or rewritten within the past 12 months. For campaigns, the practical challenge of voter contact and turnout operations has never been more state-specific.
The voting rights legal battles of 2026 are not merely academic. They will determine which eligible voters can successfully register, which voters remain on the rolls through Election Day, and which voters face new procedural hurdles when they arrive at a polling place. In midterm elections where turnout historically lags behind presidential years, every procedural barrier has an outsized impact on who ultimately casts a ballot.
Victoria Hayes is a senior elections reporter for Media Hook, covering campaigns, voter demographics, and electoral integrity in the United States and abroad.