The right to vote in a free and fair election is one of our most basic civil rights and is fundamental to maintaining a democratic republic. Americans can have confidence in election outcomes only if they can trust that the process is fair and honest. Legitimate voters should be able to vote in privacy without being harassed, secure in the knowledge that their vote will not be lost, stolen, altered, or negated by fraud, mistakes, and errors or a vote cast by an ineligible individual, such as a non-citizen or a felon.
Heritage will increase faith in elections and protect the right to vote for all Americans by advocating for commonsense reforms in the states, such as requiring voter ID, cleaning up inaccurate voter rolls, and ending the practice of vote trafficking of absentee ballots. And we will always oppose a federal takeover of our elections by Washington, D.C., elites.
Election integrity requires offense on the state level to enact reforms and defense on the federal level to stop the Left’s efforts to consolidate power over elections within the federal bureaucracy. There is much we can achieve, even in divided government, to ensure that the 2024 presidential election is conducted with integrity and that Americans can rely on the results.
We will work at the federal level to ensure election integrity.
The Heritage enterprise will block any effort by Congress to federalize our election systems and take control away from the states in order to centralize it in Washington, D.C. We will work with Members of Congress and allied organizations to supply the political pressure and winning messages needed to defeat the Left’s dangerous legislation.
We will assist in litigating election challenges, including in the areas of redistricting, absentee balloting, vote trafficking, drop boxes, and voter ID, through 2024. We will support court challenges by allied groups that uphold best practices for elections, including by helping them to refine and strengthen their arguments before federal courts of appeal and the U.S. Supreme Court and soliciting amicus briefs on their behalf.
We will push for congressional hearings to expose the Left’s attempts to undermine our election systems, including actions taken by federal agencies in response to Biden’s executive order directing them to become involved in voter registration and other election activities.
We will work at the state level to pass election integrity reforms and defend the electoral college.
In the states, we will work with governors, state legislatures, secretaries of state, and grassroots activists to pass election integrity reforms, including voter ID requirements, preventing ballot trafficking, restricting private funding in elections, allowing election observers access to the polls, and more. These election integrity best practices as well as analyses of every state’s election integrity efforts can be found at Heritage’s Election Integrity Scorecard.
We also will continue to debunk the false Left and media narrative that election fraud does not exist and increase national awareness of fraud and its danger to honest elections. We will do this in part through our media appearances and op-eds, by hosting state-based events to educate Americans about best practices for secure elections, and by launching a digital campaign featuring Heritage’s Election Fraud Database and its sampling of almost 1,400 recently proven cases of fraud from across the United States.
And we will continue to defend the Electoral College and block efforts to implement the National Popular Vote and ranked choice voting with our work in the media, in congressional hearings, and in the states.
Heritage provides the knowledge resources to equip lawmakers, secretaries of state, and activists with the information they need to ensure free and fair elections. Select studies from our experts can be found below:
- Election Integrity Scorecard
- Census Bureau Errors Distort Congressional Representation for the States
- Best Practices and Standards for Election Audits
