New voter laws rooted in myth

Voting rights legislation is front and center in the U.S. Senate, where it’s more controversial than it should be.

In a democracy, the right to vote should be a no-brainer. That’s what democracy is all about. One person, one vote — no more and no less.

And if the right to vote is a hallmark of democracy, then making it easy to cast that vote should follow naturally. But it’s apparently not that simple.

In the United States today, there’s a striking difference between the two major parties on ease of voting. Democrats generally want to clear impediments to an easy vote path, noting that higher turnouts better represent the will of the people. Republicans generally favor a narrower path with more checkpoints on the way to the polls, on the theory that such restrictions are necessary to prevent voter fraud.

The Republican theory flies in the face of election reality in America. 

Very, very little election fraud has been detected in recent U.S. elections, whether in Democratic-controlled states that operate with voter-friendly regulations or in Republican-controlled states with shorter voting hours, more restricted absentee voting and tighter voter registration laws.

The conventional theory is that recent Republican timidity about relaxing voting rules arises from former President Trump’s repeated claim that he lost because of massive voter fraud in a number of swing states. Efforts to validate his claim have been shot down by state officials, courts and subsequent vote audits. 

But a shockingly high percentage of Republican voters claim to believe Trump, and they have relied on his claim of fraud to justify their party’s drive to make the voting process more challenging in states they control.

Whether Republicans sincerely believe Trump’s fraud claims or are simply using them as an excuse to restrict the voting process is immaterial in the final analysis. The result is the same: most Republican controlled states have tightened their voting laws in recent months.

Republicans may be accurately assessing what happens when more people vote.

The 2020 presidential election broke all voting records in U.S. history. Republican Donald Trump received 74.2 million votes, comfortably surpassing Barack Obama’s previous record of 69.5 million votes in 2008. But Democrat Joe Biden soared above Trump’s record, notching 81.3 million votes in 2020, a big seven million votes more than Trump’s 2020 figure.

A startling sidelight in 2020: Biden beat Trump in electoral votes 306 to 232, exactly the same margin — 306 to 232 — by which Trump had defeated Democrat Hillary Clinton in 2016.

At any rate, the Democrat won in 2020 with a record voter turnout nationwide, and Republicans are taking ostensibly legitimate steps in the states they control to erect more hurdles for the voting process.

But barring yet-to-surface proof of widespread fraud in the 2020 election, there’s no ethically sound rationale for those new hurdles. Democracy presumes high voter turnouts in order to function properly; the higher the turnout, the more legitimate are the winners. 

Common sense, and polling data, suggest some checkpoints are popular with the American public. Voter identification, for instance, is supported by most Americans. That issue should not be a red line for Democrats in their congressional negotiations with Republicans. 

But some recent restrictions pushed in Republican controlled states are simply bizarre. 

Why ban food and water for voters waiting in long lines at polling places? Why eliminate Sunday voting where it’s been traditional for many years? Why sharply curtail long-standing absentee voting periods and Election Day voting hours? Why allow partisan “monitors” to bully voters at polling places? 

U.S. Attorney General Merrick Garland last week announced he’s doubling the Justice Department’s attorneys in its civil rights division in an attempt to crack down on questionable election practices nationwide.

Some Republicans make the argument that the federal government should have no authority over states’ voting procedures. 

That dog won’t hunt. 

The 15th Amendment, giving former slaves nationwide the right to vote, was adopted more than 150 years ago. The federal Voting Rights Act was adopted in the mid-1960s to overrule Jim Crow laws that some Southern states had enacted to prevent Black voters from exercising their rights.

The U.S. House, controlled by Democrats, earlier this year approved the For The People Act, a wide-ranging bill designed to fight state voter suppression laws, to fight gerrymandering, and to eliminate so-called “dark money” in elections, among other topics. 

This week the bill is on the Senate’s agenda. Both because Senate Republicans can exercise the filibuster and because West Virginia Democratic Sen. Joe Manchin dislikes the bill, the For The People Act has an uphill battle in the Senate.

But if it can’t be adopted in its entirety — and strong arguments can be made both for it and against it — there are portions of it that simply make good sense for a stronger democracy in the United States. 

It’s time for good faith negotiations on both sides. 

Recent state voter restriction laws should not go unchallenged. 

Senators on both sides of the aisle often recite the wisdom of Abraham Lincoln. They need to honor his First Inaugural Address with its call to “the better angels of our nature.”