How Voting Itself Escalated Into a U.S. Political War

(Bloomberg) -- Elections give candidates the chance to square off over issues. In the U.S., elections have become the issue. Differing state rules on registering to vote, showing photo identification at the polls, voting early and voting by mail have triggered fights between Democrats, who generally favor fewer obstacles to voting, and Republicans, who say restrictions are necessary to reduce opportunities for fraud. Those fights escalated after former President Donald Trump insisted, contrary to all evidence, that the November 2020 election had been stolen from him and delivered to Democrat Joe Biden. That election featured the highest level of voter turnout this century, 67%, and an unprecedented share, 73%, of ballots cast early, whether in person or by mail, as citizens made use of expanded voting opportunities during the pandemic.

1. How is the fight playing out?

As of May, Republican lawmakers had introduced almost 400 bills in 48 states that would reduce voter-registration opportunities, strengthen voter ID requirements and roll back expansions of mail voting and early voting enacted in advance of the November election, according to the Brennan Center for Justice. Such initiatives had made it into law in at least 14 states. One of those laws, in Georgia, prompted Major League Baseball to pull its annual All-Star Game from Atlanta, saying the sport “opposes restrictions to the ballot box.” Since Republicans controlled the legislature and governor's office in 23 states, compared with 15 for Democrats, they had more opportunities to enact changes over opposition protests. In Congress, meantime, a Democratic push to establish federal standards for voter registration and mail-in voting was stymied by united Republican opposition.

2. Why do the two parties see things so differently?

It's commonly assumed that higher turnout helps Democrats. This is premised on the notion that Democratic-leaning groups -- college-aged, lower-income, Black and Hispanic voters -- tend to vote more sporadically. Trump, in a March 2020 interview, warned that expanding opportunities to vote by mail during the pandemic would lead to “levels of voting that, if you ever agreed to it, you'd never have a Republican elected in this country again.”

3. Does higher turnout really help Democrats?

Studies have found little reason to believe so. In fact, there's scant evidence to support any of the commonly held assumptions. Strict ID laws “do not affect the relative vote share of Democratic and Republican candidates,” according to a study done for the National Bureau of Economic Research. And expanding early voting might not boost turnout. The authors of a report by the Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research on 2020 voting data from Texas found that 64-year-olds, who needed an excuse in that state to cast a ballot by mail, voted at almost the same rate as 65-year-olds, who didn't. Widespread early voting might actually keep some prospective voters away by making Election Day less of a milestone event.

4. Did voting by mail help Biden win?

It's clear that many more Biden supporters chose the vote-by-mail option. But that doesn't mean they wouldn't have cast ballots for Biden in person. Another post-election study, by the Public Policy Institute of California, found that making voting easier in 2020 slightly helped Republicans, if it had any partisan effect at all. And a post-election survey by the U.S. Census Bureau found that older and more affluent voters -- groups that Trump won -- reported making particularly heavy use of the vote-by-mail option.

5. Then what explains all the fighting?

For months before the election, Trump and some of his prominent supporters disparaged mail-in voting as ripe for fraud, and they claimed without evidence after his defeat that the election was stolen. They weren't swayed by dozens of court decisions and audits upholding procedures and results in various states, nor by the assurances of election officials -- Republican and Democrat alike -- that the 2020 vote was one of the most secure ever. Well into 2021, a majority of Americans who identified as Republicans were telling pollsters they doubted the legitimacy of Biden's win. Among their unsubstantiated suspicions: that voting machines had been manipulated, millions of fraudulent mail ballots cast and thousands of votes recorded for dead people.

6. Since when does the U.S. restrict voting?

It always has. The nation's founders limited the vote to those who held property or paid taxes -- White men, basically. Even now, long after state laws and constitutional amendments enfranchised Black people, Native Americans and women, more than 2% of potentially eligible voters cannot vote due to a prior felony conviction. And the U.S. is one of the few countries that hold elections on a regular work day, rather than on a weekend or a work holiday. (More than two dozen countries make voting mandatory, though few impose significant penalties.) Former President Barack Obama described the U.S. as “the only country in the advanced world that makes it harder to vote rather than easier.”

The Reference Shelf

The Brennan Center for Justice tracks state-level voting law proposals and has compiled a list of studies on the impact of voter ID laws.
The National Conference of State Legislatures has a database of changes in state election laws and a breakdown of state voter identification requirements.
An Ohio State University site tracks election-related cases.
Foreign Policy magazine looked at why it's “so hard to vote in America.”
The case for voter ID laws, from the Heritage Foundation.