There have been major wins on the election integrity front — many that have slid underneath the radar — according to a report from the Honest Elections Project.
“In 2025, conservative state legislatures delivered key wins against two of the most pressing threats to election integrity and voter confidence: foreign interference in state ballot measures and ranked-choice voting,” the report’s introduction reads, noting that in 2025, seven states “considered legislation to ban foreign nationals and foreign-funded groups from influencing ballot measure campaigns,” and eight states took it a step further and “adopted strong laws protecting the integrity of state constitutions and public referenda against foreign interference.”
The report notes:
Foreign nationals are prohibited from funding candidate campaigns and PACs, but most states lack similar protections for ballot measure campaigns. As a result, foreign nationals and foreign-funded entities are free to fund and influence campaigns that change state constitutions or even rewrite the rules of the very elections that foreigners are forbidden to influence.
Further, six states joined nearly two dozen others in ending ranked-choice voting (RCV), which the Honest Elections Project says “replaces the principle of ‘one person, one vote’ with a complicated process in which voters rank numerous candidates in each race and winners are computed by eliminating poor-performing candidates, redistributing votes, and eliminating exhausted ballots.” Liberal megadonors have aggressively supported RCV, it adds.
“In 2025, state legislatures advanced more ranked-choice voting prohibitions than any other year. So far this year, six states have enacted RCV bans, making a total of 17 states that have prohibited RCV—all since 2022,” the report reads.
The most recent states to prohibit RCV are Arkansas, West Virginia, Kansas, Iowa, North Dakota, and Wyoming.
“Conservative states led a wave of reforms focused on securing elections, expediting results, protecting against noncitizen voting, and bolstering confidence in the fairness and integrity of elections,” the report continues, citing data from Ballotpedia that found states with “Republican trifectas enacted more legislation this year than last, adopting 405 new laws compared to 224 in 2024.”
However, there is more work to be done — particularly in the next year — the Honest Elections Project emphasized, calling on Georgia, Indiana, North Carolina, Ohio, and Texas to “proactively ban RCV” before it is too late.
“In 2025, states across the country took extraordinary steps to ban the foreign funding of ballot issue campaigns and ranked-choice voting, two of the biggest threats to election integrity and voter confidence facing the nation, and they did so in record numbers,” Honest Elections Project Executive Director Jason Snead said in a statement.
“Meanwhile, liberal election attorney Marc Elias continues to argue that foreign nationals like Swiss billionaire Hansjörg Wyss have a right to influence American elections. Fortunately, he has lost at every turn,” Snead continued, deeming 2025 a “banner year for election integrity.”
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