Blog
U.S. Voting Laws & Legislation Center by LexisNexis
The LexisNexis® Rule of Law Foundation has launched U.S. Voting Laws & Legislation Center, a free, publicly accessible tool for locating U.S. federal and state voting and election law and for tracking proposed legislation on the topic. According to a LexisNexis press release, this “first-of-its-kind” analytics tool leverages data from both State Net and Lexis+ (the latter of which is available on Jenkins’ four onsite Lexis terminals!) to provide the public with full-text access to “timely, fact-based, unbiased records” of such laws and legislation.
The Voting Center's repository boasts over 20,000 enacted laws and more than 2,000 proposed legislative items (since 2021), including underlying documents.
Users can interact with the Voting Center's data in several ways.
A central search bar includes dropdown menus to narrow a query by jurisdiction or by the status of the law/legislation (i.e., Proposed Legislation, Enacted Laws, Recently Enacted Laws, and Failed Legislation).
The Center’s 50 State Voting Laws Comparison displays an easy-to-use table that summarizes each state’s (and the District of Columbia’s) permitted methods and options on the following aspects of voting:
- Absentee Voting
- Early Voting
- Voter ID
- Voting Leave
- Voter Registration
An interactive heat map of the nation offers a visual representation of how many election or voting related bills were pending in each state’s most recent legislative session. A dropdown menu allows users to filter this data by various subtopics such as Election Infrastructure and Voting Proof of Citizenship.
Clicking on any particular jurisdiction on the map opens a pop-up window with proposed legislation and further links to a dashboard with a “curated summary of content” for that state.
With current news articles on voting law and a tool that tracks the progress of proposed legislation rounding out the website, the U.S. Voting Laws & Legislation Center is a great resource for staying informed.
For additional insight into PA law on this topic, check out Jenkins' Pennsylvania Election Law Legislative Histories Database, which provides histories for many acts amending the Pennsylvania Election Code.
