Republicans are trying to impose Trump’s voting restrictions at the local level

Shasta County, California, recently approved one of the most sweeping local attacks on voting since 2020: a measure that would end most mail-in and early voting, require strict photo ID to register and vote, force election officials to hand count ballots and disconnect the county from California’s statewide voter registration system.

The initiative, known as Measure B, passed this month with 56% of the vote in the rural Northern California county, where President Donald Trump received 67% of the vote in 2024. 

California is suing to block the measure, warning that Shasta County is trying to carve itself out of statewide election protections that apply to all 58 counties. 

“No city or county gets to unilaterally rewrite our election rules,” Attorney General Rob Bonta (D) said in a statement.

But Shasta is not an isolated case. 

It is one of the latest and most aggressive examples of a pattern that has spread since the 2020 election, as Republican local officials, conservative activists and election deniers have tried to use ballot measures, county boards, city charters and local election offices to restrict voting or interfere with election administration on the local level — even where state law preempts them.

Some of those local efforts have focused on strict document requirements. Others, like Shasta’s, have targeted mail-in and early voting. Still others have gone after ballot drop boxes and voting machines.

But the strategy behind them is often the same. If anti-voting activists cannot pass restrictive policies statewide or nationally, they can still try to force them through at the local levels with similar effects. It’s a front in the fight over ballot access that deserves scrutiny as the midterms approach.

California has already fought this fight

Before Shasta County approved Measure B, Republican-leaning Huntington Beach passed a narrower but similar local measure that would have allowed the city to require voters to show photo ID at the polls for municipal elections starting in 2026.

That measure, known as Measure 1, was approved in 2024 and quickly became a test case in California for whether a charter city could impose voting restrictions that state law does not allow. 

Huntington Beach officials argued that the city had power over its own municipal elections. California, meanwhile, argued that the right to vote and the rules protecting it are matters of statewide concern — meaning local governments cannot create conflicting election rules just because they disagree with state law.

Last November, a California appeals court sided with the state, ruling that Huntington Beach’s ID requirement was unlawful and preempted by state law. The California Supreme Court later declined to take up the city’s appeal, leaving the ruling in place.

Local officials are making voting harder without legislation

Not every local voting restriction looks as dramatic as the measures in Shasta County or Huntington Beach. Some are quieter, decided in county board meetings or by local administrators, where officials can make voting harder by reducing the places, hours and tools voters rely on to cast ballots.

In North Carolina, for example, that struggle has centered on early voting — one of the most popular ways voters participate in the state’s elections. Under state law, voters there can cast a ballot at any early voting site in their county, rather than only at their assigned Election Day polling place, and eligible voters can register and vote on the same day during the early voting period.

That makes early voting sites especially important for students, working voters and voters without reliable transportation people or who cannot easily get to the polls on Election Day.

But ahead of the 2026 primary, Republican-controlled county election boards advanced plans to cut voting locations, remove campus polling places or eliminate Sunday voting in several counties.

In Guilford County, local Republicans targeted early voting sites at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro and North Carolina A&T State University, the nation’s largest historically Black university. While in Jackson County, Republican board members moved to remove a longstanding early voting site at Western Carolina University. 

The Republican-controlled state election board later rejected campus voting sites in those counties and cut Sunday voting in others.

The same pattern has played out around drop boxes, which became a major target of Republican attacks after 2020 even though they are a secure, heavily used way for voters to return mail-in ballots.

In Luzerne County, Pennsylvania, the county manager moved to remove all drop boxes ahead of the 2024 election, citing security concerns. The decision came after the county board of elections had already approved using them, and voting rights groups sued, arguing that the manager had no authority to override the board. The drop boxes were later restored.

In Wausau, Wisconsin, the fight was even more literal. 

Mayor Doug Diny removed the city’s lone drop box from outside City Hall in September 2024, posing for photos in a hard hat and work gloves as he carted it away. The box was later returned, and the city’s ethics board found that Diny violated Wausau’s ethics policy.

Prosecutors declined to charge him criminally.

These fights show how local officials can restrict voting without formally banning it through state legislation.

Removing an early voting site, cutting Sunday hours or taking away a drop box may sound administrative. But for voters who depend on those options, those decisions can determine whether voting is easy or impossible.

Election deniers are taking their war on voting machines local

Local anti-voting efforts have also focused on hand counting, which 

has become a central demand of the post-2020 election denial movement — even though election experts have repeatedly warned that it is slower, less reliable and far harder to scale than using tested voting equipment.

In Nye County, Nevada, county officials moved to count ballots by hand after false claims about widespread fraud fueled distrust of voting machines. The Nevada Supreme Court limited parts of the plan before the 2022 midterms, the secretary of state’s office halted the count after a legal challenge and the county ultimately used machines as its primary vote-counting method while running a parallel hand count.

In Cochise County, Arizona, Republican supervisors tried to launch a full hand count audit of early ballots in 2022, despite warnings from state and county officials. A judge blocked the plan, and an Arizona appeals court later affirmed that the county could not conduct a full hand count of all early ballots. 

After losing the hand count fight, county supervisors also delayed certification of the 2022 election results before complying with a court order.

The same distrust of voting machines showed up in Otero County, New Mexico, where Republican commissioners refused to certify 2022 primary results because they said they did not trust the county’s vote tabulators, despite offering no evidence of problems. 

The commission had also voted to discontinue secured drop boxes and state voting machines, even after being told it lacked legal authority to do so.

And in Thornapple, Wisconsin, a small town’s decision to remove voting machines ran into federal disability protections. 

The U.S. Department of Justice, under President Joe Biden, sued after the town stopped using accessible voting machines, arguing the move violated the Help America Vote Act — a federal law that requires polling places to give voters with disabilities the same opportunity to vote privately and independently as other voters.

The town eventually agreed to bring accessible machines back.