If Republicans have a majority in a state legislature in the U.S. — or even if they don’t — chances are they are proposing some type of voter suppression bill in 2021. The obvious goal is to make it more difficult for Democrats to vote in the 2022 and 2024 elections. But journalist David Frum, a Never Trump conservative, considers this terrible policy on the part of Republicans —and in an article published by The Atlantic, Frum lays out “four specific ways that their voter suppression measures may backfire” and hurt Republicans more than Democrats.
Reason #1, according to Frum: “Voter suppression can countermobilize its targets.”
Frum explains, “Requiring extra paperwork, imposing burdensome identification requirements and facilitating lengthy queues on Voting Day are effective ways of dissuading people who are only weakly committed to the political process; they are less effective against people strongly committed to the process. But in the 2010s, Republicans repeatedly used voter suppression to elect politicians — including Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp and President Donald Trump — who proceeded to convert their opponents’ weakly committed supporters into strongly committed voters.” Continue reading.