State legislatures are back for their 2025 sessions, and promoting the integrity of our elections should be high on the list of priorities.
After all, last year voters passed state ballot measures banning noncitizen voting and requiring voter ID while rejecting others that sought to impose California-style jungle primaries and ranked-choice voting (RCV) — all by wide margins. The message is clear: the public expects our leaders to make it easier to vote and harder to cheat.
Over the last four years, states like Georgia, Florida, and Texas have done exactly that. Their reforms helped deliver two high-turnout federal elections. But elections remain far from perfect, and now is the time for states to pass new laws to improve and secure them before the 2026 elections.
Lawmakers should start by banning foreign funding for ballot issues. While foreign nationals are barred from contributing to political candidates, a legal loophole permits them to directly and indirectly finance ballot measure campaigns. Hansjörg Wyss, a Swiss billionaire, has donated at least $243 million to the Sixteen Thirty Fund, a left-wing group that in turn spent $130 million to influence ballot measure campaigns in 25 states.
Ohio passed legislation banning foreign money in ballot issues last year, and thankfully the voters defeated a foreign-funded ballot issue that would have redrawn Ohio’s political maps to favor Democrats. 85% of registered voters oppose this type of foreign interference. In other words, there is a bipartisan consensus that states should act before groups like the Sixteen Thirty Fund can taint future elections with foreign-tied cash.
This should also be the year ranked-choice voting is finally brought to an end. Under RCV, the principle of “one-person, one vote” is replaced with a complicated system in which voters rank multiple candidates for the same office in order of preference.
RCV makes it harder to vote and makes the results more confusing. Left-wing megadonors are spending huge sums boosting RCV to push politics to the left.
In fact, last year they spent at least $100 million on ballot measures to impose RCV on six states. But voters rejected them all, in red and blue states alike. Eleven states have already banned RCV. It’s time for every state to follow suit.
It’s also time for states to shut down “Zuck Bucks” programs once and for all. In 2020, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg pumped more than $400 million into left-wing nonprofits, which pumped the funds into election offices in an effort to boost turnout for Joe Biden.
Most states have now banned these grants. But the Center for Tech and Civic Life (CTCL) – the group behind the original scheme – came up with “Zuck Bucks 2.0,” an $80 million program dubbed the U.S. Alliance for Election Excellence, designed to evade these bans and let CTCL keep pushing politics into election offices. In 2024 they even launched a new program targeting rural offices in states without private funding bans.
States should focus on passing new laws to end Zuck Bucks 2.0 before the program can influence another election.
Lawmakers should also ban noncitizen voting and require proof of citizenship when registering to vote. Left-wing politicians in New York City and Washington, D.C. have already passed laws so egregious that even illegal aliens could vote in city elections. Despite liberals’ demands, nearly nine in 10 Americans reject noncitizen voting and 83% support proof of citizenship requirements.
Voters in eight states approved constitutional amendments last year to ban noncitizen voting, as well. Lawmakers should seize on that momentum.
There are myriad other laws that should be passed. States should require photo ID for every vote cast, whether in person or by mail. 84% of Americans think everyone should be required to show a photo ID to vote, a level of support higher than it was four years ago.
Legislators should also strengthen mail voting laws. For example, unsolicited ballots should never be sent. States should require ballots be received by Election Day, as 32 states already require.
Early voting should be offered for a maximum of 14 days, a policy supported by an overwhelming bipartisan majority. Drop boxes should be tightly regulated and staffed at all times or banned altogether.
These are just some of the steps essential for securing our elections. The newly released report, Safeguarding Our Elections by the Honest Elections Project offers a more in-depth look at policies state lawmakers can implement to further secure their elections and promote public trust in outcomes.
With state legislatures back in session, now is the perfect time to continue to make it easy to vote and hard to cheat.
Jason Snead is the executive director of Honest Elections Project Action.
The views and opinions expressed in this commentary are those of the author and do not reflect the official position of the Daily Caller News Foundation.
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