West Virginia
Ballot Security
What Politicians Say
The state continues to experiment with online voting, which the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine says is “fundamentally insecure.”
In 2018, West Virginia allowed certain voters to return ballots electronically, using Boston-based startup Voatz Inc.
MIT researchers uncovered flaws with the system that could allow hackers to alter or expose how someone voted.
Although the company argued that report was flawed, West Virginia later switched to a different system from Seattle-based Democracy Live.
Another study from MIT researchers found that the system posed a “severe risk” to election security and could allow hackers to alter election results without detection.
Under a 2022 law, first responders who are responding to natural disasters away from their home and people with disabilities can vote electronically.
A separate law passed in 2022 in response to widely circulated conspiracy theories about Dominion voting machines bars electronic voting machines used in in-person voting from connecting to other machines or directly to the internet.
Ease of Voting
According to statistics from University of Florida political science professor Michael McDonald, West Virginia had the fourth-lowest turnout rate among all people eligible to vote in 2020.
Ballot Security
Recent legislation makes it a misdemeanor to try to stop or delay a voter from entering a polling place and a felony to attempt to vote more than once in the same election. Another law
bans private donations to run elections, such as the grants that Meta Platforms Inc Chief Executive Officer Mark Zuckerberg gave out to other states in 2020.
How Politicians Responded to the 2020 Election
Republican Governor Jim Justice initially refused to recognize that Biden had won the election, waiting until mid-December before acknowledging he had won.
Attorney General Patrick Morrisey supported a Texas lawsuit asking the Supreme Court to intervene in the election, as did two out of the state’s three Republican US representatives at the time.
One representative objected to certifying Biden electors from Arizona and two objected to Pennsylvania.
Representative David McKinley, who voted to certify both states, lost a Republican primary in 2022 to Representative Alex Mooney, a prominent defender of Trump’s baseless claims of election fraud, after the state lost a congressional seat.