There are probably Republicans in state legislatures around the country who sincerely believe, despite the lack of credible evidence, that our system of administering elections allows for and includes rampant fraud. Given the extent to which Republican voters hold that belief, one has to assume that some Republicans who are paid to know better simply don’t.
But there is also clearly a surfeit of Republicans who support new efforts to constrain access to voting regardless of whether they think fraud exists. More than 250 laws are or have been under consideration in state legislatures this year aimed at introducing new voting restrictions, despite there having been only one actual criminal conviction for voter fraud in last year’s election, according to a database run by the conservative Heritage Foundation. Perhaps those laws are driven by concern that Democrats have been cheating, so legislators want to limit the ability to do so. Or perhaps they’re just driven by the less complicated concern that Democrats are simply voting. Either way, the effect is the same, as is the rationalization.
What can be hard to pick out of this battery of new laws is how, exactly, the results of elections in the sponsoring states might change. We can look at a change like the one proposed in Arizona, where the deadline for receipt of mail ballots would be moved up, and see, as reporter Garrett Archer did, that this would have excluded the votes of 43,614 more Republican ballots than Democratic ones in a state President Biden won by 10,457 votes. But we don’t know precisely what would have happened if the deadline had been moved. Would those voters have acted more quickly? Would they have not voted? It’s hard to say. Continue reading.