New Jersey
States struggle with unreliable federal funding for making sure elections are secure • New Jersey Monitor
WASHINGTON — The federal government has sought to bolster election security for years through a popular grant program, but the wildly fluctuating funding levels have made it difficult for state officials to plan their budgets and their projects.
Rising misinformation and disinformation about elections, often fueled by conspiracy theories, as well as threats against election workers, make the grants especially important, according to elections officials.
But U.S. House Republicans are seeking to eliminate funding for election security grants — known as Help America Vote Act, or HAVA grants — in this year’s appropriations process, a move they unsuccessfully attempted last year as well.
“We continue to unnecessarily risk the very integrity of our elections and American democracy,” Georgia Democratic Rep. Sanford Bishop said Thursday during committee debate on the funding bill.
Bishop, a senior member of the House Appropriations Committee, said he was “concerned about the outdated and the insecure voting systems around the country that pose a very, very serious threat to our national security and to our democratic system.”
“It is irresponsible to ignore the wake-up call,” Bishop added. “Our nation’s election systems are currently and constantly under attack by foreign actors that are threatening our democratic values.”
The bill was approved by the GOP-led House Appropriations Committee with no money in it for the grants.
Gideon Cohn-Postar, legislative director at Issue One & Issue One Action, said during an interview with States Newsroom that while the grants have traditionally been bipartisan, several factors have affected backing for the program in recent years.
“It remains something that many Republicans in both the House and the Senate support,” Cohn-Postar said. “But it’s also been caught up, I think, in some of the false information about elections that began to spread in 2020.”
Former President Donald Trump, now the presumptive Republican presidential nominee, has continued to falsely claim that the 2020 election was stolen.
Issue One writes on its website that the organization strives to “unite Republicans, Democrats, and independents in the movement to fix our broken political system and build an inclusive democracy that works for everyone”.
Grant funding decreases
Congress approved $55 million in election security grants during the last appropriations process, which wrapped up this spring. That action came after the Republican-controlled House, which proposed zero dollars, conferenced with the Democratic-controlled Senate, which had proposed $75 million in funding.
That final funding level was a decrease from the $75 million that Congress approved in both fiscal 2023 and fiscal 2022.
Congress didn’t approve any election grant funding in the annual appropriations bill during fiscal year 2021. However, that followed lawmakers’ allocation of $425 million in the prior year’s bill as well as an additional $400 million in one of the COVID-19 emergency spending bills.
Cohn-Postar said that several states have sought to make their HAVA grants last more than one year by spending less than they receive, or saving the money up for bigger projects.
Louisiana, for example, hasn’t spent any of its election security grant funding since 2018, in preparation for overhauling its election system. New Hampshire passed a state law that collects the grant funding in an endowment and then only spends a portion of that each year.
But that “careful” budgeting and uncertainty about how much grant funding Congress might provide in the next year has led federal lawmakers to look at states’ use of the grants skeptically, Cohn-Postar said.
“The key thing we’ve come across … is about half of the states have only spent about half of their HAVA grants,” Cohn-Postar said. “And that gets brought up in every conversation that Congress has about these grants. They say, ‘Hey, why should we appropriate more if you haven’t spent?’”
Congress, he said, sometimes uses states’ “careful, thoughtful budgeting as an excuse to not give them money.”
Republicans in Congress are also looking to reduce federal spending overall and have made cuts throughout many of the dozen annual spending bills, including the Financial Services bill, which includes the HAVA grants.
‘Incredibly important’ in Maine
Maine Secretary of State Shenna Bellows said during an interview the grants “have been incredibly important, especially in the absence of sustainable elections funding from the federal government.”
“We have seen the rapid evolution of cybersecurity threats and threats against election infrastructure over the last several years,” Bellows said. “As the threats evolve, so must our preparedness. The election security grants are fundamental to our ability to make investments in improvements in our central voter registration system and cybersecurity protections for that system.”
Congress’ inability or unwillingness to create a predictable, stable funding program for states to administer federal elections is “unfortunate,” she said.
“We are very proud that Maine has always enjoyed safe, free and secure elections,” Bellows said. “But make no mistake, the lack of sustainable ongoing federal funding is a potential vulnerability in the future.”
Washington state Elections Director Stuart Holmes said in an interview he plans his annual budget around not getting HAVA election security grants and is pleasantly surprised when Congress does provide the funding.
“Through my entire career, there’s only been two rounds of HAVA that were significant investments into elections,” Holmes said. “So it’s a great surprise to get an extra million dollars at the beginning of the year. But it does make it pretty much impossible to prepare and plan for anything if you have to spend it.”
The grants don’t expire at the end of the fiscal year and the federal government doesn’t claw back unspent funding, allowing the states to take different approaches to how they use the money.
Holmes said during his interview with States Newsroom that the funding approved in fiscal 2020 allowed the state to “create an entire team of cybersecurity professionals to be dedicated to protecting our infrastructure.”
“In the state of Washington, we have a centralized voter registration and election management system, and never before had we had dedicated election professionals that are watching the logs, preparing our system, testing our system and collaborating with other professionals to do testing,” Holmes said. “So we’re in a better position than we’ve ever been.”
Even so, he said, “local election officials would certainly look forward to a stable funding source from the federal government as it relates to federal elections.”
New Hampshire election fund
New Hampshire Secretary of State David M. Scanlan said when Congress passed the HAVA program in 2002, it told states the funding was primarily to set up a statewide voter registration database, ensure every polling place had accessible voting equipment, provide poll workers with training and set up voter education programs.
The New Hampshire Legislature at the time told the secretary of state to use the initial allocation from Congress to meet the requirements, but then to establish an election fund with the remaining money.
Originally, the secretary of state could use one-twentieth of the total funding in the account for annual costs of maintaining the federal mandates, but that is currently one-twelfth of the total amount in the fund.
“New Hampshire has been doing a good job with the money that we have, but there’s no question that the funds have helped us put in place security measures for our electronic systems,” Scanlan said.
The state, he said, has used its federal election security grants to hire vendors that specialize in keeping the electronic systems safe.
When New Hampshire set up a new voter registration database, the state used the funding to ensure none of the software included anything nefarious.
“We’ve really been making sure that the systems that we’re building are clean and that there’s not something malicious lurking in the shadows,” Scanlan said. “We’ve taken some really good steps that give me real confidence that our systems are in good shape.”
Advocating for ‘consistent, reliable federal funding’
JP Martin, deputy communications director for the Arizona secretary of state, declined States Newsroom’s request for an interview with the secretary of state, offering only to provide written responses to questions on HAVA election security grants.
Martin wrote in an email that “fluctuating levels of federal funding have significantly impacted our strategic planning and budgeting.”
“The uncertainty of future allocations compels us to be cautious with expenditures, focusing on priorities such as enhancing physical security measures for voting equipment,” Martin wrote. “For instance, securing equipment in cages—now requires a liftgate-equipped truck due to their increased weight—demonstrates the challenges of managing technological and budgetary constraints under limited HAVA funding.”
Congress declining to provide election security grants in the future “could significantly strain Arizona’s election infrastructure,” he wrote.
“Currently, the state is under a hiring freeze, and our focus remains on supporting counties, especially with the recent changes such as the date of the primary and legislation extending ballot curing to weekends,” Martin wrote. “We are prioritizing increased cybersecurity training and advocating for consistent, reliable federal funding to ensure the smooth administration of elections, emphasizing the necessity of sustained financial support from Congress.”
(TNS) — Artificial intelligence will be used to score most of the writing New Jersey students do on the new statewide standardized tests set to debut this spring, state education officials said.
The AI system will be used to grade student essays and short answers on the English Language Arts section of the statewide exams, according to a state-approved testing proposal. The “artificial intelligence” will be trained using scores generated by human scorers on practice tests that were given to students in October and November.
New Jersey is debuting a new type of state tests — called the New Jersey Student Learning Assessments-Adaptive — this spring. It will be given to students in grades 3 through 10 to test their knowledge of English, math and science.
There will also be a new version of the state’s high school exit exam for high school juniors, now called the New Jersey Graduation Proficiency Assessment-Adaptive.
Like the previous version of the test, known as the NJSLA, the exams will be given via computer. But the new version will be “adaptive,” meaning students will get different questions based on their previous answers on the exam — a practice that is supposed to make scoring the tests more precise.
The AI system will be used to score the essays and written questions, but there will still be some human scorers, state Department of Education Spokesperson Michael Yaple said.
If a student’s written response is identified as “unusual” or “borderline” it will be “flagged for human review,” Yaple said.
“The system regularly conducts quality assurance checks to ensure that the scores assigned by the automated scoring engine match human scores through strict quality controls,” he added.
Cambium, the company overseeing the new tests, does not use generative AI — the version of artificial intelligence used in ChatGPT-type platforms that can create something new and are known to sometimes hallucinate false or inaccurate information, Yaple said.
Instead, the automated scoring system will have strict parameters “with proven consistency, and human scoring remains the foundation of the process, validating accuracy at multiple checkpoints throughout the scoring workflow,” state education officials said in a statement.
Computerized scoring of New Jersey’s state tests is nothing new. Last year, about 90 percent of student essays on the NJSLA and the state high school exit exams were scored solely by an automated scoring system, Yaple said.
But some educators have concerns about the extensive use of AI to grade the new version of the tests that will eventually be taken by nearly all of New Jersey’s 1.3 million public school students.
Using a version of AI to score student writing is risky, said Steve Beatty, president of the New Jersey Education Association, the state’s largest teachers union.
He said he would hate to see “some student fail on a computer-graded test only to find out later on that there was some sort of error.”
The NJEA is against high stakes testing in general, Beatty said. But if the tests are going to continue “then we want trained educators — humans — doing” the scoring.
If a student fails the AI-scored sections of the exams, there should be a plan to have the writing reassessed by a human, he said.
“They should go back to a person to be verified,” Beatty said.
NEW TESTING CONTRACT
New Jersey students will begin taking the new NJSLA-Adaptive exams during a month-long testing window between April 27 and May 29. The tests are usually given over several consecutive days.
The testing window for the new NJGPA-Adaptive high school exit exam for high school juniors will be from March 16 to April 1, according to a state Department of Education testing schedule.
The new statewide NJSLA and NJGPA tests were developed by Cambium Assessment, a company that won a $58.7 million, two-year contract with the state.
According to the Cambium proposal, Measurement Incorporated, a company located in Durham, North Carolina, will be responsible for providing and training the people who will do the human “handscoring” when AI-generated essay and written response scores are flagged for review.
In its proposal to the state, Cambium said the company assumes “25 percent of the overall responses will be routed for trained handscoring.”
New Jersey officials said AI was not used to create test items on the new version of the tests and artificial intelligence will not be used to determine which questions students see on the adaptive assessments.
Jeffrey Hauger, who served as director of assessments for the state Department of Education from 2010 to 2018, said New Jersey has a long history of using computers to help score the written portion of state tests. He later worked as an adviser to Pearson, the company that previously had the contract to provide the state NJSLA tests.
Around 2016, Hauger said the state started implementing a system that used one human and one automated scorer to assess each piece of student writing.
If a large discrepancy between the two scores was found, the essay would be read by a second human, he said.
“It was a tool for efficiency, but the human was always involved throughout the process back then,” Hauger said.
AI scoring is now more sophisticated, he said.
“Technology has improved. And so, it’s not as big of a leap now as maybe people think it is,” Hauger said.
During Gov. Phil Murphy’s time in office, the department started relying more on automated scoring and moving away from having each piece of writing evaluated by both a machine and a human, he said.
FLAGGING PROBLEMS
AI scoring has been controversial in other states.
In Massachusetts, AI grading errors were blamed for 1,400 incorrect scores on the state’s Massachusetts Comprehensive Assessment System, known as the MCAS, last year.
In Texas, several districts questioned whether AI grading was fair on its statewide tests in recent years.
The Dallas Independent School District has challenged thousands of AI generated essay scores on Texas’ statewide STAAR standardized tests over the past two years.
Cambium and Pearson, the companies involved in New Jersey’s testing, both contributed to Texas’ standardized testing system.
In 2024, the Dallas school district asked the state to rescore 4,600 tests, sending them to the state to be rescored by humans.
About 44 percent of the rescored tests came back with higher scores after a human read them, said Jacob Cortez, Dallas’ assistant superintendent in charge of evaluation and assessment.
The district also sent thousands of AI-scored tests for rescoring last year and nearly 40 percent came back with higher scores from humans, the district said.
The accuracy rate for the AI-scored third grade tests was the most troubling, with 85 percent of those sent back showing an improved score when humans read the students’ work.
“That is not okay,” Cortez said.
The Dallas school district, which serves about 139,000 students, limited the number of tests it sent back for rescoring because it had to pay $50 for each test that did not receive an improved score, local officials said.
Cambium officials did not respond to requests for comment about the Dallas accuracy issues or the company’s AI scoring practices.
New Jersey officials declined to comment on questions about AI scoring accuracy in other states.
“New Jersey cannot comment on another state’s assessment and scoring process,” Yaple said.
Lily Laux, New Jersey’s new commissioner of education, also did not respond to a request to comment. In her previous job as Texas’ deputy commissioner of school programs, she helped design the state’s standardized testing system, according to her LinkedIn profile.
The problems with AI scoring in Dallas raise questions about the system, said Scott Marion, principal learning associate at the Center for Assessment, a nonprofit, nonpartisan consulting firm.
“Is it not being trained well? Is it not being trained on a diverse enough population?” Marion asked.
AI scoring makes financial sense but states also need to be careful not to overly rely on it, he said. He’s comfortable with about 80 percent AI-scored writing because systems still need human backups.
“We’ve been doing this for so long,” he said referring to the use of AI to score student writing.
Many students, teachers and parents may be surprised to know how much of writing in school is already scored by AI, education advocates said.
Many “parents have no idea this is a thing,” said Julie Borst, executive director of community organizing for Save Our Schools New Jersey, a statewide advocacy group.
She is concerned that students with unique writing styles might end up with lower scores on tests because AI is looking for specific words and phrases or a standard number of sentences for top scores.
Borst, whose organization has long-opposed high stakes standardized testing, said in the end, it will still be up to teachers to know where students are doing well and where they are struggling.
“The teacher is going to know where those weaknesses are. They’re going to know where those strengths lie,” she said. “You cannot tell that — at the student level — from a standardized test.”
©2026 Advance Local Media LLC. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.
3-minute read
Gov. Mikie Sherrill addresses affordability crisis in NJ: video
Watch new Gov. Mikie Sherrill on state affordability: “Too many people are working too hard and still falling behind.” Jan. 20, 2026 at NJPAC, Newark
Gov. Mikie Sherrill is set to present her first state budget proposal in a Tuesday, March 10, address to the New Jersey Legislature. It’s clear the proposal will make some hard choices as state finances face major headwinds.
Late last month, Sherrill said her budget plan will include some “tough choices” because of the looming uncertainty of a structural deficit for state finances.
The governor explained that if projections stay on the current path, the state would have a structural deficit of about $3 billion by the end of June, when her proposed budget would be in the final stages of negotiations with the Legislature.
Uncertainty due to federal funding cuts, along with the end of pandemic relief funding, has already forced Sherrill to consider all of her options when crafting her plan for New Jersey’s fiscal year 2027.
The governor wouldn’t give particulars about what to expect in her upcoming fiscal plan but instead said she is “setting the table so people can anticipate that this is going to be a tough budget season.”
What does a structural deficit mean for New Jersey taxpayers?
A structural deficit, simply put, means New Jersey spends more than it earns.
Among the costliest tax relief programs in the state’s history, Stay NJ was introduced legislatively in the run-up to the fiscal year 2024 budget and received funding for three years without paying anything out.
The first Stay NJ checks are being sent out to qualifying New Jersey seniors, but the accumulated $1.2 billion covers only the first six months of the program for this year. Roughly $900 million will need to be added to the line item in Sherrill’s first fiscal plan to maintain the program.
The law that created Stay NJ requires full pension payments, full school funding payments and a surplus of at least 12% to be built into the budget as prerequisites for funding the program. The surplus was not 12% when the budget was signed during the last two years, but budget language allowed for a work-around.
Sherrill would not commit to requiring the prerequisites before she would be willing to sign a budget bill in late June.
Increasing costs for the State Health Benefits Program, which is already a contentious topic, could also be a concern for the new governor, as payments are about $2 billion annually and the 10% increase needed in this year’s budget added more than $180 million.
How does New Jersey’s budget process work?
New Jersey’s $58.8 billion budget for fiscal year 2026 is the largest in history and is set to expire at the end of June.
The plan for fiscal year 2027 — which will run from July 1, 2026, through June 30, 2027 — is a major factor in how New Jersey state government will function by dictating which state departments and programs are funded.
After Sherrill’s address in March, her proposed spending and revenue plan will be analyzed and shaped in the Legislature through the spring. Negotiations will heat up as the current fiscal year winds to a close in June. If the budget cycle is normal, a final budget bill will land on Sherrill’s desk hours before the current fiscal year ends at 11:59 p.m. on June 30.
Though it would be unlikely — given Democratic control of both chambers of the Legislature and the governor’s office — in the event the budget bill does not get signed, state government shuts down. There have been two shutdowns in state history: for 10 days in 2006 and three days in 2017.
Katie Sobko covers the New Jersey Statehouse. Email: sobko@northjersey.com
Phil Murphy on NJ Transit future during State of State address
Gov. Phil Murphy discussed the future of NJ Transit during his final State of the State address.
A woman was fatally struck by a train in Ramsey on the morning of March 8.
The unidentified woman was hit by the train at 10:49 a.m., just west of the Main Street crossing near the main Ramsey station, said John Chartier, director of media relations for NJ Transit.
Rail service was suspended in both directions between Allendale and Port Jervis but has since resumed, with delays of up to 30 minutes.
The train came from Port Jervis and was heading to Hoboken, and 150 people were on board at the time, Chartier said.
NJ Transit police are leading the investigation. No additional information about the circumstances of the death was available.
FAA grounds all JetBlue flights after request from airline
Nature needs a little help in the inventive Pixar movie ‘Hoppers’ : Pop Culture Happy Hour
Apple smart home display rumors now point to a fall launch with iOS 27
Trump says it’s an ‘honor’ to keep Strait of Hormuz open for China and other countries
Trump reveals top issues GOP should focus on to secure midterms victory: ‘I’ve never been more confident’
Florida High School Football Rankings: Top 25 teams – Oct. 21
Cleary's 21 help Le Moyne down Central Connecticut State 69-64 in OT
How old is Bo Nix? What to know about Oregon quarterback ahead of 2024 NFL Draft
99th annual Pony Swim held in Virginia
Indiana Members Credit Union announced as new anchor tenant at Bottleworks District
Trump reveals top issues GOP should focus on to secure midterms victory: ‘I’ve never been more confident’
NATO intercepts another Iranian missile in Turkish airspace
Is Iran another Iraq? : Sources & Methods
Trump says Iran war will be “over pretty quickly” as oil price hits 6 year high | BBC News
China-linked birth tourism under scrutiny as GOP lawmakers press Trump admin for answers
-
Wisconsin1 week agoSetting sail on iceboats across a frozen lake in Wisconsin
-
Massachusetts7 days agoMassachusetts man awaits word from family in Iran after attacks
-
Maryland1 week agoAM showers Sunday in Maryland
-
Florida1 week agoFlorida man rescued after being stuck in shoulder-deep mud for days
-
Pennsylvania5 days agoPa. man found guilty of raping teen girl who he took to Mexico
-
News1 week ago2 Survivors Describe the Terror and Tragedy of the Tahoe Avalanche
-
Sports5 days agoKeith Olbermann under fire for calling Lou Holtz a ‘scumbag’ after legendary coach’s death
-
Virginia6 days agoGiants will hold 2026 training camp in West Virginia