GOP states have made it harder to vote. The changes could swing tight races

By Bob Ortega, CNN

(CNN) — When voters in Tarrant County, part of a key swing district in Texas, prepare to cast ballots for the midterms, they’ll encounter a whole new set of rules.

Those allowed to send mail-in ballots will now need to provide a Social Security or state ID number. And in-person voters will find that nearly 100 polling places have been shuttered – including all sites in one zip code that’s mostly Black and Latino.

Those kind of changes aren’t unique to Texas.

Republican lawmakers and officials around the country have taken steps at the state and local level to make it harder to vote this November, from enacting stricter registration requirements to adding ID restrictions to dramatically reducing early voting sites, polling places and ballot drop-boxes.

These changes, pushed through state Capitols and county boards of election, have not received the same attention as President Donald Trump’s dramatic attempts to curb mail voting and assert control over voting rolls, but they could have just as significant an impact on turnout in key races to control Congress.

The new restrictions, all passed since the last midterm election in 2022, could affect highly competitive Senate races in states including Iowa, Ohio, North Carolina and Texas, as well as toss-up House races, as Democrats seek three seats to retake the House and four to win the Senate.

“Many states are emulating the president’s agenda at the state level,” in ways that affect “whether eligible voters have a clear accessible path to cast a ballot,” said Celina Stewart, CEO of the League of Women Voters. “In 17 years of working on voting rights, I have never seen such a widespread and coordinated effort to restrict access to the ballot.”

Voters in at least 22 states face new hurdles in casting their ballots compared with the 2024 election, according to a recent Brennan Center report. These new restrictions come on top of at least 78 restrictive laws passed by 30 states between 2020 and 2024.

Many GOP state and local officials have argued that the changes are needed to help make elections more secure, often echoing Trump’s repeatedly debunked claims that voting fraud runs rampant.

Speaking in August at the Republican midterm convention, Texas Gov. Greg Abbott said his state had adopted “the toughest voter ID law in the United States of America,” and that “we made clear that in elections in Texas, you have to be a United States citizen to vote.”

However, there’s no evidence non-citizens have voted in Texas or any other states in significant numbers. Election experts say the new restrictions could depress turnout by making it harder for first-time voters to register and for those without driver’s licenses – such as some seniors and disabled voters – to cast ballots.

The changes in some locales are being made over significant protests from residents – including in Tarrant County, where many of those in a long line of speakers at a recent meeting pleaded with commissioners not to cut polling sites.

As protesters massed outside on September 1, the GOP-controlled county commissioners court voted 3-2 along party lines to reduce polling sites by nearly 30 percent – a change that County Judge Tim O’Hare said was needed to save money.

Opponents, though, said the cuts will make it harder to vote for groups seen as likely to back Democrats in the highly competitive county.

“Jane and Jim Crow are very much alive in Texas today,” said Brianna Brown, Executive Director of the Texas Organizing Project, which works to protect minority voting rights. “In Texas,” she said, “the demographics of young people and black and brown people are increasing, so the GOP is looking at ways to shrink participation.” She noted that Black and Hispanic voters make up a majority of the Texas population.

Similar dynamics are playing out across the country.

Ohio: Voter ID crackdown

In Ohio, which features a tight Senate race between GOP Sen. Jon Husted and former Sen. Sherrod Brown, the Democrat, as well as numerous key House races, Buckeye voters will confront one of the nation’s strictest voter ID laws for the first time in a midterm.

That law, passed by the GOP-controlled legislature in 2023, requires a photo ID to vote, meaning Ohioans can no longer use digital IDs, paychecks or other documents as identification, or to prove residency.

For new voters, it similarly limits the kind of documents they can use to register. The law also shortened the deadlines for voters to request absentee ballots, and to fix any errors on their ballots; and it eliminated early voting the Monday before Election Day.

Ohio voters will also have fewer places to drop off ballots. The law limits each county to one drop box, open only during business hours, and says only voters with a documented disability who can’t physically enter a polling place can use curbside voting. It also made it a crime for anyone other than an immediate family member to drop off a ballot for a disabled voter, with some exceptions.

GOP officials said the law would protect the security of elections in the state.

“Elections integrity is a significant concern to Americans on both sides of the aisle across the country,” said Ohio Gov. Mike DeWine, a Republican, at the time it passed.

The ID restrictions in large part target non-citizen voters, but there’s little evidence such voters exist in large numbers. In a 2024 review of the state’s 8.2 million registered voters, the Ohio Secretary of State’s office found 137 non-citizens wrongly registered to vote through the Bureau of Motor Vehicles. There was no indication any of them had voted.

Last year, the legislature also adopted a law that requires absentee ballots to arrive before polls close on Election Day. Previously, ballots could arrive later, as long as they were postmarked by Election Day.

On Sept. 29, a federal appeals court reinstated a provision that requires proof of US citizenship from anyone trying to register to vote through the Bureau of Motor Vehicles.

The law could also affect many college students who have out-of-state driver’s licenses, which are no longer acceptable ID in Ohio to register or vote.

“Students are often first-time voters. The law says if they are residents on a college campus, they can use that address to register to vote. In Ohio, you have to show a utility bill,” as one option to prove where you live, said Rebekah Caruthers, president of Fair Elections Center, a nonpartisan voting-rights groups based in Washington, DC. “But if you live on campus, you don’t get utility bills.”

Jen Miller, executive director of the League of Women Voters of Ohio, said that voters who don’t have driver’s licenses must use provisional ballots. As a result, she said, Ohio has some of the highest provisional ballot counts in the country this year.

Critics say the drop box limitations particularly hurt voters in large urban areas – a demographic fact that will impact Black voters in particular in major Ohio cities.

“Think about Cuyahoga County, where Cleveland is, to say more than a million people should have only one place to drop off their ballot. That is what you do when you want to make it harder for people to vote,” said Caruthers.

North Carolina: ‘This is ultimately about representation’

In North Carolina, Democrats hope to flip a Senate seat with two-term former Gov. Roy Cooper polling strongly against Michael Whatley, a former Republican National Committee chair.

Numerous House seats also could change parties, including in a race between Republican state Rep. Jennifer Balkcom and Democrat Jamie Ager. Both are seeking to replace Rep. Chuck Edwards, who dropped out of Congress after an ethics panel found evidence he repeatedly made unwanted advances toward two female staffers.

As CNN recently reported, state and local GOP leaders have worked to significantly restrict voting in the state – including by sharply cutting back on Sunday voting and imposing new restrictions on how mail-in ballots are processed.

The GOP-controlled legislature also transferred authority in 2024 over the state board of elections from the governor, a Democrat, to the state auditor, a Republican, who could then appoint Republicans to controlling positions on the state board and every county board of elections.

This year, those county elections boards voted not to have early-voting polling places near or on a variety of college campuses, including at North Carolina A&T State University, the nation’s largest historically Black college or university, and UNC-Greensboro, among others.

Francis De Luca, chairman of the State Board of Elections, said in January that he opposed voting sites on university campuses because they had limited parking.

Students have pushed back hard against the changes, including in Guilford County, home to North Carolina A&T and UNC-Greensboro, to no avail.

“Students have been attending meetings at the Guildford County Board of Elections for months. Both have significant on-campus populations and are close to areas with a significant number of residents who don’t have access to a vehicle,” said Tyler Daye, program manager for Common Cause North Carolina.

At North Carolina State University, in Raleigh, the Wake County Board of Elections voted along party lines to move the early voting site this year from the Talley Student Union, at the center of campus, to a building a mile away and across a busy boulevard.

Boards also eliminated Sunday early voting in 23 counties. Sunday voting historically is important to Black churches that organize members to vote after services. De Luca, the state election board chairman, said that he opposed voting on Sunday because, “it’s the Lord’s Day.”

Iowa: Elderly citizens and IDs

In Iowa, two recent polls of likely voters show Democratic Senate nominee Josh Turek, a state house representative and two-time Paralympic gold medalist, running neck-and-neck with three–term GOP Rep. Ashley Hinson. There are also three competitive House races in the state.

In 2025, Iowa became among the earliest states to agree to use the federal SAVE citizenship-verification database, which has misidentified eligible voters as non-citizens.

In May, Republican Gov. Kim Reynolds signed into law a bill that changed Iowa’s “attestation” law, which allowed a fellow voter from the district to vouch for the eligibility of someone who shows up to vote without a permitted ID. Now, those voters must use a provisional ballot and return by the Monday after Election Day with a valid ID to have their vote counted.

State Rep. Adam Zabner, a Democrat from Iowa City, told CNN, “I have concerns about the Republican agenda on voting and on this bill in particular.”

He said that “most people who take advantage of this system are older Iowans who no longer drive, don’t have driver’s licenses, and come in with family members who attest for them.” He noted that, under the old law, anyone falsely attesting to someone’s identity would have been criminally liable.

Kansas: A 94-year streak

Kansas, which Trump won with 57% of the vote in 2024, hasn’t elected a Democrat to the US Senate since 1932. But now the race between incumbent Republican Sen. Roger Marshall and Democrat Adam Hamilton, a United Methodist pastor, is neck and neck.

This year, term-limited Gov. Laura Kelly, a Democrat, vetoed several bills passed by the GOP-controlled legislature that would have enacted voting restrictions.

But lawmakers overrode her veto to enact the SAVE Kansas Act, which expands methods for purging voter rolls, restricts third-party efforts to register voters, and orders state agencies to share, with the Kansas Secretary of State, data on non-citizens receiving state benefits.

Lawmakers also overrode Kelly’s veto of a new state law that eliminated the three-day grace period for mail-in ballots to arrive at election offices. The new law would require mail-in ballots to arrive at election offices by 7 p.m. on Election Day to be counted.

But in July, the Kansas Supreme Court let stand a lower-court ruling that blocks that law from taking effect while a lawsuit against it is being litigated.

Texas: ‘There is no polling place in our zip code at all’

In Texas, recent polls show no clear leader in the Senate race between Democrat James Talarico, a state representative, and state Attorney General Ken Paxton, who defeated Sen. John Cornyn in the GOP primary, marking a comeback after being impeached by the Texas House but acquitted by the Senate in 2023.

A key battleground in that race is Tarrant County, the state’s third most populous county, which President Joe Biden narrowly won in 2020 but Trump flipped back in 2024.

In September, Republican Tarrant County commissioners voted to cut early voting locations to 47 from 50 in the last midterm, and election day voting locations to 224 from 316. They also denied requested polling locations on five campuses. There also will be no polling places at all within the 76103 zip code, according to a lawsuit seeking to restore polling places. In that zip code, 76% of the population is Black or Hispanic, according to census data.

O’Hare, a Republican and the county’s chief political officer, said in a press release before the meeting, responding to criticism that the changes would make it harder for students and minority voters to get to the polls, that “no Tarrant County voter should ever feel they don’t have enough time to vote,” and that “this is a sensible plan designed to ensure that.”

On Oct. 2, a Fort Worth City Council member filed suit in state district court seeking to reinstate the 92 voting sites cut in September.

“What they have done is systematically gone through and made it harder for people of color, people in lower economic areas and people in Democratic areas to vote,” said Deborah Peoples, who said she filed the suit as a private citizen, not a city council member. “This was something we could not sit idly by and not speak up about.”

O’Hare’s campaign adviser Nick Maddux dismissed the suit as intended to benefit Tarrant County Commissioner Alisa Simmons, who is running against O’Hare. “Tarrant County voters will not be fooled by these shenanigans,” Maddux said in a statement.

A judge this week denied the request to reinstate the sites.

Some other changes across Texas this year also remain in flux due to court challenges. In August, the 5th Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that mail-in and assisted voting restrictions will apply statewide this November.

Texas doesn’t allow universal vote-by-mail, but voters over 65 and those with certain disabilities, among others, can do so. They’ll now have to provide a Social Security or identification number matching state records for their mail-in ballot to be accepted; and anyone helping a disabled voter will have to disclose their relationship to the voter, sign an oath they didn’t coerce the voter, and disclose whether they received compensation.

Meanwhile, as first reported by Votebeat, Texas Department of Public Safety recently flooded numerous county registrars across the state with backlogged voter registration applications after discovering it had failed to process at least 500,000 applications submitted through its online driver’s license portal, some up to a year earlier.

Chris McGinn, executive director of the Texas Association of County Election Officials, said that counties across the state have been working overtime since mid-September to clear up the backlog. He said that “from what we’re hearing, all the backlog has been updated and all the voters should show on the list of registered voters” by the time early voting begins on Oct. 19.

Across the country, many of the new laws affecting voters this fall “are aimed at solving a problem that doesn’t exist,” said Sean Morales-Doyle, senior director of voting rights and elections programs at the Brennan Center.

“Disenfranchisement – the denial of a person’s constitutional right to vote – is a problem whether or not it swings the outcome of an election,” he said. “It can also have consequences beyond the election itself, shaping whose interests elected officials feel compelled to represent and respond to.”

The-CNN-Wire
™ & © 2026 Cable News Network, Inc., a Warner Bros. Discovery Company. All rights reserved.