NEW ORLEANS>> For the past two years, Democrats in battleground states have played defense against Republican efforts to curtail voting access and amplify doubts about the legitimacy of the nation’s elections.

Now it is Democrats, who retained all but one of the governor’s offices they hold and won control of legislatures in Michigan and Minnesota, who are ready to go on offense in 2023. They are putting forward a long list of proposals that include creating automatic voter registration systems, preregistering teenagers to vote before they turn 18, returning the franchise to felons released from prison and criminalizing election misinformation.

Since 2020, Republicans inspired by former President Donald Trump’s election lies sought to make voting more difficult for anyone not casting a ballot in person on Election Day. But in the midterm elections, voters nationwide rejected the most prominent Republican candidates who embraced false claims about American elections and promised to bend the rules to their party’s advantage.

Democrats who won reelection or will soon take office have interpreted their victories as a mandate to make voting easier and more accessible.

“I’ve asked them to think big,” Gov. Tim Walz of Minnesota said of his directions to fellow Democrats on voting issues now that his party controls both chambers of the Legislature.

Republicans will maintain unified control next year over state governments in Texas, Ohio, Florida and Georgia. In Texas and Ohio, along with other places, Republicans are weighing additional restrictions on voting when they convene in the new year.

Democratic governors in Arizona and Wisconsin will face Republican-run legislatures that are broadly hostile to expanding voting access, while Josh Shapiro, the Democratic governor-elect of Pennsylvania, is likely to preside over one chamber with a GOP majority and one with a narrow Democratic majority.

And in Washington, D.C., the Supreme Court is weighing a case that could give legislatures vastly expanded power over election laws — a decision with enormous implications for the power of state lawmakers to draw congressional maps and set rules for federal elections.

Democrats have widely interpreted that case — brought by Republicans in North Carolina — as dangerous to democracy because of the prospect of aggressive GOP gerrymandering and the potential for state legislators to determine the outcome of elections. But it also would allow Democrats to write themselves into permanent power in states where they control the levers of elections.

The Supreme Court’s deliberation comes as many Democrats are pushing the party to be more aggressive in expanding voting access — especially after the Senate this year failed to advance a broad voting rights package.

Adam Pritzker, a cousin of Gov. J.B. Pritzker of Illinois and cofounder of the States Project, a Democratic group that pumped more than $60 million into state legislative races this year, warned against what he described as his party’s reflexive complacency. “Democrats never cease to amaze me,” he said. “They go from like waving the white flag in states to then thinking that we won, then wanting to take the foot off the gas pedal. It just seems a little bit dangerous to think that way.”

Walz was among more than a dozen Democratic governors and governors-elect who gathered in early December in New Orleans, where the topic of defending and expanding voting access was a frequent topic of conversation in the ballrooms and hallways of the Democratic Governors Association’s annual winter gathering.

Republicans have sought additional voting restrictions for decades. Those efforts increased after the 2020 election, when several Republican-led states passed new laws with measures that included requiring voters to show photo identification, stripping control from local election boards and curtailing some early voting.

The effect of these voting laws remains unclear. In Georgia, which passed a major election law in 2021, turnout was strong, but mail voting plummeted under the new requirements.