Republican voter suppression doesn’t always work. But don’t feel too reassured.

Opinion | Republican voter suppression doesn’t always work. But don’t feel too reassured.

By Paul Waldman

A man drops off his ballot in Traverse City, Mich., on Oct. 19, 2020. (Salwan Georges/The Washington Post)

But what if they’re wrong? What if most of their voter suppression techniques are ineffective at helping them win elections?

Some new research by Emory political scientist Alan Abramowitz suggests that may indeed be the case, and it leads to two conclusions. First, most GOP voter suppression is bad for all voters, not just Democrats. Second, voter subversion is what we need to worry most about, the ticking time bomb that could lead to a constitutional crisis in 2024.

Let’s begin with something we already knew, even though most people might not be aware of it. During the 2020 campaign, Donald Trump decided — for his own inexplicable reasons — that mail voting was both necessarily fraudulent and a nefarious plot meant to keep him from being reelected. Despite the fact that Republicans had relied on mail voting for years, they quickly adopted his belief as their own.

Yet something interesting happened: While it became a partisan fight, in the end it made no difference. States that liberalized mail voting rules to accommodate people’s desire for safety during the pandemic did see slightly higher turnout, but it had no impact on the outcome of the election. Whether a state did or didn’t liberalize its rules didn’t change the margin between Joe Biden and Trump.

What about the restrictions Republicans have been eagerly passing in state after state? Abramowitz’s analysis of 2020 voting patterns shows that they may not make Republican victories more likely:

Biden typically ran a few points ahead of Clinton [in 2016], but whether a state had restrictive or generous absentee voting procedures, conducted early in-person voting, allowed voters to use drop boxes, or required photo identification to vote had no effect on Biden’s margin.

In other words, the restrictive rules Republicans advocate seem to make it harder for everyone to vote, but if they were meant to make it disproportionately harder for Democrats, they failed.

Take drop boxes. Republicans have committed themselves to the idiotic idea that putting an absentee ballot in a mailbox is okay, but putting it in a drop box is an invitation to fraud. But outlawing them doesn’t make a Republican victory more likely; it just makes the election a little less convenient.

That doesn’t necessarily mean every voter suppression measure won’t work as Republicans intend in the future. And this analysis doesn’t examine every voter suppression measure; others might make a difference. For instance, in recent years Republican states have aggressively used voter purges in the obvious hope that they would be kicking more Democrats off the rolls than Republicans, which could be true.

But a lot of places where Republicans are focusing voter suppression energy don’t seem to yield the fruit they want. Why not? One reason might be that with these measures getting so much scrutiny, GOP legislators are pressured into designing them in ways that won’t be so obviously aimed at minority voters. So they wind up suppressing a lot of their own voters in the process.

We can see the flip side in the proposals Democrats have made for reform at the national level. Many of them — creating an Election Day holiday, having uniform standards for early voting — would make voting easier for everyone; that’s what Republicans find themselves fighting against.

But perhaps the most important reason these suppression measures often fail is backlash: When Democratic voters see that Republicans are trying to keep them from the polls, Democrats are more motivated to turn out.

No one should think this means there’s nothing wrong with the voter suppression laws Republicans have passed. They’re justified with lies about voter fraud, and the fact that voters succeeded in jumping over hurdles Republicans placed in front of them doesn’t mean the hurdles didn’t exist. We ought to be making it easier for everyone to vote, no matter which side they’re on.

But it does reinforce the fact that the greatest threat to the integrity of the American democratic process probably comes from Republican election subversion efforts.

In multiple states, Republicans have passed laws focused on election administration, undermining independent election officials and creating pathways for partisan (i.e., Republican) officials to seize control, especially when it comes to vote counting. In key states, Trumpists devoted to lies about 2020 are running for governor and secretary of state, to control the election apparatus in 2024.

We’ve already seen that the Republican Party has become committed to the idea that no election is legitimate unless Republicans win it. In their pursuit of power, they’ll make plenty of mistakes and do things that don’t turn out the way they want. But there’s a lot they’re doing that should still make us very worried.