As a co-founder of the Partnership for Elections and Emergency Response (PEER) and Ready for Tuesday’s lead on supporting the project, I find emergency provisions related to elections more interesting than most.
To start to get a bird’s eye view of how states approach this, I pulled every statute and regulation the Election Law Navigator tags under “Emergency Events and Powers” and sorted them.
Process
The Election Law Navigator is maintained by the Election Law Program, a joint venture of William & Mary Law School and the National Center for State Courts. The ELN makes a cursory review of a topic’s policy landscape possible in an afternoon.
ELP uses data from Clio, updated quarterly, and like every provider of state statutory, regulatory and judicial data, that data is only as accurate as what the states supply. Each ELN state page links to the state’s official published code.
I used an AI assistant to pull the tagged entries from all of ELN's state pages and to help organize them into a spreadsheet. Because I didn’t review every provision, the summary below is based on provision title and ELN’s tagging. Rather than guess, I marked provisions as “Other” when the title didn’t make it clear what the emergency connection is.
Very important: This is a survey of a portion of one database and its tagging. It is not the law. At the risk of stating the obvious, I’ll say that election officials should check their own laws from official sources. This is not gospel.
The Numbers
ELN has tagged content under “Emergency Events and Powers” in 40 jurisdictions: 38 states (plus Puerto Rico and the U.S. Virgin Islands).
Across these states, there are 206 catalogued provisions:
135 statutes
71 regulations
Thirteen states have nothing tagged: Alaska, Arkansas, the District of Columbia, Idaho, Indiana, Massachusetts, Michigan, Nevada, New Hampshire, New York, North Dakota, Wisconsin and Wyoming.
Types of Provisions
I sorted the 206 provisions into four piles.
Jurisdiction-wide emergency: 158
Hurricanes, ice storms, power outages, machines that choose not to work at 7 a.m. … even after your team spent several months testing it to make sure it would work appropriately on that specific day. These are laws about the election itself being disrupted.
The voter’s own emergency: 12
Emergency absentee ballots for the hospitalized, provisional ballots for first responders called away on Election Day, curbside help for someone who can’t get inside.
Military and overseas voters: 9
Emergency procedures a chief election official can invoke when a deployment or a disaster cuts off a deployed voter.
Other or unclear from the title: 27
What the Laws Do
Counting states rather than sections, here is how many have at least one tagged provision of each kind.
Equipment failure and emergency paper ballots: 14 states
Broad emergency powers or emergency rule-making for the chief election official or board: 14 states
Postpone, reschedule or extend: 12 states
Relocate or change polling places: 12 states
A required contingency plan: 9 states (California, Connecticut, Florida, Iowa, Kentucky, Louisiana, Minnesota, Oklahoma and Washington)
Poll worker shortage: 3 states
Counting or canvassing during an emergency: 2 states
State by State
Thirty-four of the 40 jurisdictions have at least one jurisdiction-wide provision. Eleven have a voter’s-own provision. Seven have military and overseas emergency procedures. Only Oklahoma has all three.
Interested in learning more about how election officials approach emergency planning? Listen to the Center for Election Innovation and Research’s new podcast, The Unstoppable Vote, hosted by my friend and colleague Kyle Yoder.
Five states show only voter-level or military provisions and nothing jurisdiction-wide: Colorado, Mississippi, Nebraska, Vermont and Virginia. In ELN’s tagging, these states can help a hospitalized voter get a ballot and have nothing on the books for a natural disaster.
Get in Touch
The full spreadsheet – with every provision, ELN tags, code locations and ELN page links – is available on request.
Finally, if you know of a provision that’s missing, I’d like to hear about it. Email me at tj@readyfortuesday.com.