During the 2020 election, Rhonda Briggins and her sorority sisters spent days providing voters in metro Atlanta with water and snacks as they waited in long lines at polling places.
The lines for early voting and on Election Day at times stretched on for hours. As the national co-chair for social action with the Delta Sigma Theta sorority for Black women, Briggins felt compelled to help, and she and her sisters unofficially adopted one DeKalb County location where many elderly Georgians cast their ballots.
“When you’re a senior or someone with an infant child, line relief is very critical,” she said. “It allows someone to not have to suffer just because they want to exercise their right to vote.”
But if Briggins tries to do the same in November, she could face criminal charges.
In March 2021, four months after former President Donald Trump claimed that voter fraud cost him the state’s electoral votes and the presidency, Georgia’s Republican governor signed a law criminalizing people who give food or drinks to voters waiting at the polls.
Georgia was not alone. Across the country, states have passed new laws that give the green light to prosecutors to treat like criminals all kinds of people involved in the election process, whether they are voters, election officials or third parties that assist voters.
Since the 2020 election, 26 states have enacted, expanded, or increased the severity of 120 election-related criminal penalties, according to an analysis by States Newsroom of state legislation and data from the Voting Rights Lab.
Of those new penalties, 102 of them — the vast majority — were enacted in 18 Republican-controlled states: Alabama, Arizona, Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Indiana, Iowa, Kansas, Kentucky, Louisiana, Montana, Nebraska, North Dakota, Oklahoma, South Carolina, Texas, West Virginia, and Wyoming.
In Oklahoma, for example, voters who apply to receive a blind-accessible ballot electronically but are not blind are now committing a felony. And in Texas, it’s a felony for an election official to solicit the submission of a mail ballot application by a person who did not request one.
Briggins could get up to a year in jail now for handing out snacks or water. “That is just inhumane,” she said. “They’re on the wrong side of history.”
Many of the new criminal penalties are being challenged in court. In a request for an injunction to stop the line relief ban, attorneys representing Briggins’ sorority, non-profit groups, and a Black church wrote, “If anything threatens election integrity in Georgia, it is the law that treats these messengers like criminals.”
More than 60 new felonies
States Newsroom analyzed every voting-related bill passed by state legislatures since the 2020 election, creating a database of every new criminal offense codified into law. In total, states enacted more than 60 new felonies and more than 50 new misdemeanors.
The new offenses, made law in dozens of voting bills, range from low-level misdemeanors to felonies punishable by up to 20 years in prison.
While there are no official projections of how many Americans might wind up charged with felonies or misdemeanors, some states, like Florida, have already beefed up their elections enforcement offices. A handful of other states have given power to investigate election crimes to new agencies or government officials.
The new laws not only criminalize actions typically described by Republicans as voter fraud (like altering a ballot, electioneering, or voting more than once), but also criminalize the activities of people trying to assist voters or attempting to make an election run smoothly.
Sean Morales-Doyle, the acting director of the voting rights program at the liberal-leaning Brennan Center for Justice, said many of the new laws regulate what are often innocent or even laudable actions. Others have vague definitions of what could be considered criminal conduct.
